Program Manager: 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 an experienced leader who is excited about designing and 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 Program Manager, 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. As a core member of the NEAR Foundation, 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 be empowered to build clear, repeatable systems for implementing, measuring, and scaling our Grants Program and play a key role in its distribution and governance. In short, you’re in charge of everything “Grants” at the NEAR Foundation, which is its most important function.

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 leading or building a similar program in the past but perhaps most importantly, you need to be familiar with the zeitgeist of the crypto space. 

Logistics

This is a full-time, partially remote position with the NEAR Foundation located in Switzerland or Germany, where you should be able to commute to the office for a couple of days per week in Zug, Switzerland or Berlin, Germany. Candidates are eligible for relocation assistance but EU and Swiss citizens will be prioritized.

Key Outcomes

• Architect and implement the structures to drive a massively successful grants program which distributes more than $100M worth of grants over 5 years to more than 1,000 projects and drive ecosystem-level OKRs.
• Work with marketing and community teams to create buzz and distribute the word around our Grants Program and coordinate its sourcing.
• Build out the team and best practices to manage and track OKRs & KPIs related to the Grants Program, in collaboration with the community-run governance teams and grant committees. 

Key Requirements

• Technical experience preferred
• Blockchain experience strongly preferred
• 5+ years of work experience in program management, management consulting, venture capital, corporate development, operations or project management. 2+ years with demonstrated leadership and success in a grant or funding distribution position.  Preference will be given to leaders who have architected and run similar programs before.
• Demonstrated ability to think strategically and creatively while applying sound business judgment and quantitative analytics
• Excellent oral and written skills to communicate complex issues and influence others internally and externally.  Also that rare combination of ability to communicate across many stakeholders, think strategically about crafting the program but also shepherd processes to their completion.

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.