Program Coordinator, Grants

Are you passionate about the blockchain space and building a better internet with community-driven innovation and governance? Are you great at cultivating relationships and aligning internal teams behind a common goal? Are you excited about operating a massive strategic funding program which will help ensure the builders of this ecosystem are given the resources they need to take it to the next level?

As NEAR’s Grants Coordinator, you will work closely with entrepreneurs and our internal teams to establish and operate a Grants Program that helps those building on NEAR to deliver amazing applications for the Open Web. You will help to create buzz and distribute the word around our Grants Program. You’ll work with our marketing, community, and OWC teams to source and fund high quality projects that deliver the best Web 3.0 has to offer.

You will play an important role in supporting clear, repeatable systems for implementing, measuring, and scaling our Grants Program. We're seeking a Grants Coordinator who can juggle all of the balls that have to land properly in order to make multiple simultaneous grants processes work.  That means everything from the initial application intake, carefully recording notes for all steps in the process, to coordinating the logistics to successfully issue a grant.  This also requires the ability to understand ecosystem needs and do an initial filtering of applications and projects. It also involves keeping track of metrics and reporting to evaluate the results of the program. 

Specifically, the right fit for this position should be highly process oriented but also comfortable with sourcing and interviewing potential grant recipients. You will wear many hats and coordinate with other team members in the operations team, the grants team, and across the NEAR ecosystem.  

To be successful, you’ll need to be very organized and tactical, employing strong strategic thinking and a good understanding of NEAR’s ecosystem. You should have demonstrated success in working in a similar program in the past but perhaps most importantly, you need to be familiar with the zeitgeist of the crypto space. 

Key Outcomes

• Implement the structures and carry through the processes to drive a massively successful grants program.
• Work with marketing and community teams to create buzz and distribute the word around our Grants Program and coordinate its sourcing.
• Support the Grants team in managing and tracking OKRs & KPIs related to the Grants Program, in collaboration with the community-run governance teams and grant committees. 

Key Requirements

• Blockchain experience strongly preferred
• 2+ years of work experience in operations, program management, management consulting, venture capital, or project management.  Preference will be given to those who have run similar programs before.
• Very strong project management and organizational skills
• Excellent oral and written skills to communicate complex issues and influence others internally and externally. 

About NEAR and the NEAR Collective

NEAR's mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world. The NEAR platform provides a decentralized application platform that is secure enough to manage high value assets like money or identity and performant enough to make them useful for everyday people, putting the power of Open Finance and the Open Web in their hands.

The NEAR platform, NEAR Protocol, and associated tooling are being built by the NEAR Collective, a collection of the best engineers in the world who work across teams, companies and countries similar to other large scale open source projects. Core contributors include a couple of 2-time ICPC world champions, 2 gold medalists, a Latin American champion and multiple other competitive programming finalists.

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.