Project Manager - Funding Team

NEAR Foundation

11/21/2021

  • Remote
  • Full time
  • Crypto/Fiat

Project Manager - Funding Team

NEAR Foundation

  • Remote
  • Full time
  • Crypto/Fiat
Share this offer

Introduction

The NEAR project is unlike anything else out there -- it combines the collaborative community of an open-source project with aspects of developer platforms like Heroku or AWS. This provides a unique opportunity for someone who is sufficiently "T-shaped" to participate in initiatives across domains and apply deep operational skills to ensure that they are successfully implemented. As the Chief of Staff, you will not just help the NEAR Foundation to realize its internal mission but your scope of operation spans the entire ecosystem and the reach of the role is perhaps broader than any other. In that way, you will both participate in the scrappy culture of a startup and help drive a range of major initiatives at the scale of a large enterprise or global social movement.


The Role

NEAR Foundation is hiring a Project Manager, reporting directly to our Head of Funding. The primary objective for you is to optimize the Funding Platform by managing key projects across each of our funding programs in support of our ecosystem fund. This means taking on a significant range of responsibilities and exposing yourself to pretty much everything that's happening at the strategic, tactical and organizational levels of the Foundation and its ecosystem. It's an opportunity to learn from a firehose but it will also be quite challenging because of the varied nature of tasks and the follow ups they require. It involves a combination of strategic thinking, grunt work in the trenches and a huge amount of ownership mentality to see projects through.


Key areas of responsibility are commensurately broad and include:


Drive implementation of the funding team initiatives across the organization, ensuring full alignment and accountability.

Spin up new initiatives as the "tip of the spear" to turn ideas into structured operations that you can then scale yourself out of. These might range from finding a team to build a component to standing up a $100M go-to-market program.

Support the Head of Funding to develop and track team-wide success metrics across our quarterly OKRs. 

Prepare decks and organize communication events, and support reporting processes across the funding team. 

Be the human router for all the little things -- whenever something requires followup, we'll need your help to make sure it happens but we'll also need your help to figure out the best way to implement brand new ideas.

Come up with other creative ways to make the Funding Platform more effective, whether by creating new programs, streamlining operations, managing more effectively or kick-starting and owning a completely new initiative.

This is a position without any standing direct reports but a huge amount of responsibility. The general approach will be guided by the following: "what's the most important thing that needs an owner right now? Ok, figure out how to do it, do it, then hand it off." The role is designed to catapult you through new experiences and allow you to grow with an uncommonly "behind the scenes" perspective on leadership and ecosystem evolution. Potential next steps are similarly broad -- this sets you up to do anything from general management of major initiatives to functional leadership to startup founding.


To do this effectively, you will need to have an uncommon level of organization and ability to get things done but also a considered strategic perspective on the goings-on of the org. You also will need to effectively use influence rather than authority to help create the actions that are necessary to succeed. This means winning over a wide range of function heads along the way.


You will traverse the full breadth of the organization and should be excited to meet all of its members! You will touch things at the highest executive level and all the way down to the tactical details. You should have a challenge-driven startup mentality and be excited by stepping up to an open trough of knowledge. Basically, an insatiable thirst for new challenges mixed with get-shit-done follow-through will make this a winning experience.


Requirements

This is a quirky sort of position which requires someone with enough experience to have very strong judgement but also a certain maverick personality and startuppyness so you are always thirsty for more knowledge and responsibility. Specifically:


3+ years of experience building in business operations or project / program management for leading technology companies or consultancies 

2-3 years of experience operating at the exec level of a growth organization or 2-3 years of owning a high impact team or program that required significant cross-team collaboration.

A crazy ability to get things done and the organization to follow them up.

Great communication skills, particularly in English

We value:

ECOSYSTEM-FIRST: always put the health and success of the ecosystem above any individual's interest.

OPENNESS: operate transparently and consistently share knowledge to build open communities.

PRAGMATISM OVER PERFECTION: find the right solution not the ideal solution and beat dogmatism by openly considering all ideas.

MAKE IT FEEL SIMPLE: strive to make the complex feel simple so the technology is accessible to all.

GROW CONSTANTLY: learn, improve and fail productively so the project and community are always becoming more effective

 


About the NEAR Foundation

The NEAR Foundation is a nonprofit, non-beneficiary foundation based in Switzerland which supports community-driven innovation and the Open Web with a specific focus on the NEAR platform. The Foundation distributes grant funding into the NEAR ecosystem, coordinates governance among participants, educates people about the protocol and ensures that relationships among the community members are as strong and sustainable as the apps they build. It seeks to combine the inclusive care of a community-driven NGO with the at-scale effectiveness of a Silicon Valley startup.



Share this offer

Apply Now