In Brief

  • Despite the ups and downs in the crypto markets, demand for skilled workers has increased 26% year over year.
  • Wages are on average $105,000 (US).
  • Many of these jobs, such as smart contract engineer and head of staking, are radically new kinds of positions.

Whether you believe crypto spring is coming, the crypto jobs market is already starting to bloom.

Despite the ups and downs of the crypto markets, employment sites are still registering brisk demand for the blockchain savvy. Despite a mostly meh year in crypto, crypto-related jobs increased by 26%, according to an end of year study by Indeed.com.

An earlier report by Electric Capital helped paint a picture of that job market. Thanks to the growth of Bitcoin, DeFi and increased awareness of enterprise blockchain, the number of full-time blockchain developers had increased by 13% year-over-year by the summer 2019. For chart fans, Devin Banerjee from Linkedin even identified a correlation between the price of bitcoin and blockchain developer hiring.

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Source: LinkedIn

The money is good, too. Mashing up data from Glassdoor.com, teQatlas reports salaries for Blockchain-related jobs in the US hit an average of $105,000 per year, more than two times the average salary in the US.

Location wise, according to job offers data, SF & NYC are the US hubs, London and Berlin lead for the EU and Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia.

The most sought after workers tend to be in the fields you’d expect: Engineering (31%), Operations (17%), Marketing (13%), Design (105), Sales (9%), according to 2019 job posts on Crytocurrencyjobs.co. The research reported a strong increase in demand for sales, design and compliance roles, which could signal a refocus on product launchand an industry that’s starting to mature (in a good way.)

At the same time, a number of jobs that never existed before are arising.

Let's take a look at some of these.

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Any DeFi-ers in the house?

Companies are actively exploring DeFi trends such as automated asset-management strategies, pooling, staking, lending, DEXs. Some new jobs that are emerging:

Decentralized Finance product designer

Description:

  • You provide the product vision and leadership in making cryptocurrencies easy and enjoyable to use for institutional and retail investors.
  • You create UX assets that are simple, intuitive, and consistent across web and mobile platforms.

Qualifications:

  • 5+ years experience in mobile-first financial product design.
  • Good understanding of the major chains, their use cases and customer base.

Bonus: Staking and pooling doesn't sound like “sports” to you.

DeFi PR director

Description:

  • Create impactful messaging around DeFi products.
  • Manage sensitive issues to maintain the company's reputation.
  • Plan and document contingency and communication plans to a variety of stakeholders.

Qualifications:

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8 years or above relevant experience in PR, marketing or corporate communications, preferably gained in banks, financial institutions.

Bonus: A sixth sense during crisis management.

For the trailblazers: DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations emulate many of the functions of corporate business entities or non-profit organizations but without the “inefficient” bureaucracies.

DAO architect

Description:

  • Define and propose to clients: governance, business flows, funds management, legal frameworks for their DAOs or LAOs (Legal Autonomous Organization).

Qualifications:

Formerly head of operations or COO you deeply understand how a company works and envision how to systematize operations.

Bonus: You can do the split between "rage quit" functionality and code is law.

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DAO Juror (In the DAO world, conflicts and legal disputes are no longer settled in a courtroom, but by arbiters of the blockchain network.  DAO courts provide an interesting mechanism for unbiased third-parties to come in and settle an issue from a neutral standpoint. DAOs begin seeking human jurors to join their tokenized "court.”)

Job Description:

  • Jurors deliberate and rule on cases and receive compensation.
  • You're able to track and gather all relevant information to do your job well.
  • Willing to be paid in crypto for subscriptions, dispute and appeal fees.

Qualifications:

Can not be under indictment for or have been convicted of a felony charge.

Between 21 and 65.

Good character, and has sufficient knowledge of the language of the court proceedings.

Must have: Ready to stake tokens or crypto currencies to prove your integrity and skin in the game.

DAO Signaler

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Job Description:

  • You are a grants and fund raiser professional.
  • Your specialty is signaling to DAOs your project specification and needs for funding.
  • You coordinate applications, vetting processes and continuous feedback.

Qualifications:

2+ years of experience as crypto VC.

Great crafter of efficient messaging.

Very high accountability and talent at documenting it.

Bonus: You understand what sablier finance does and have an outstanding track record at keeping streamed funds coming.

For traders and financiers

As trading proliferates, exchanges and brokerages will have a boundless appetite for a variety of finance professionals.

Head of Institutional crypto coverage

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Job Description:

  • Work closely with wealth, trading, staking and custody product teams to refine the firm's approach to serving the institutional clients.

Qualifications:

You have a great commercial instinct and High EQ.

Bonus : Demonstrate excellence in making informed judgements, and setting priorities in ambiguous situations.

Compliance officer—Crypto Futures markets

Job Description:

  • Maintain and adapt market monitoring and surveillance policies.
  • Assist with quarterly and yearly regulators returns/ad hoc filings.
  • Be a point of contact for client questions on the rulebook.
  • Conduct complaint investigations and maintain corresponding logs

Qualifications:

Experience on capital markets automated activities.

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Bonus : You're willing to be the first mover in this early industry.

Head of Stablecoin

Job Description:

  • Refine the roadmap for stablecoin business.
  • Specify and build a platform for external stakeholders to build on.
  • Develop relationships with key partners, including exchanges, DeFi protocols teams, and cryptocurrency market participants.

Qualifications:

Strong understanding, interest, and relationships in decentralized finance.

Ability to translate digital asset information effectively across compliance, legal, engineering, and executives teams.

5+ years of total experience, 2+ years in crypto.

Bonus: You can explain the difference between: USDT, USDC, USDK, GUSD, BUSD, DAI, SAI, HUSD, etc.

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Crypto Audit & Tax Director

To sustainably grow digital assets practices & FP&A, companies in immediate need of Crypto Auditors.

Job Description:

  • Work with our treasury team to ensure our entities’ liquidity and net capital regulatory requirements are met.
  • Report on monthly financial performance across the group and its business lines.
  • Produce entities annual financial statements and accompanying disclosures.
  • Support requests from local monetary authorities.

Qualifications:

Comfortable with crypto wallets, exchanges, and their APIs.

Agile with spreadsheets and crypto tax tools.

Bonus: you went through the process of paying your crypto tax at least one time in your life.

Technologists only need apply

Engineers are essential in every tech business, of course. But here are some of the more unusual new job opportunities.

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Crypto Custody engineer

Job description:

  • You are the first experience of onboarding crypto staking validators & large financial institutions digital assets teams.
  • You own all aspects of our cloud deployments, including provisioning, monitoring, security, high availability, disaster recovery and connectivity.

Qualifications:

Configure, maintain, and troubleshoot multiple technologies such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Web-application Firewall, Hardware Security Module (HSM), packet capture, and network malware detection solutions.

You are as comfortable with Asia and western Cloud service providers infra.

Bonus: Your Twitter descriptionis: Crypto wallet is a dish not only best served cold.

QA automation engineer (Smart Contracts).

Job description:

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  • Meticulously test and retest products through functional & black-box testing.
  • Create and maintain detailed test scripts to verify software and smart contracts functionality, and adherence to business requirements.

Qualifications:

Experience in verification of smart contracts and hardware cryptographic elements.

Experience capturing design specification in a temporal assertion language such as PSL.

Bonus: For you, testing and formal verification are 2 different things.

Data discovery & cleaning lead

Job description:

  • Small data hunter, you are working hand in hand with customers and investment teams to uncover quality data.
  • You give a human feeling to our infrastructure.
  • You are passionate about data lineage and deduplication.
  • You help us extract high-quality data from our partners chains.

Qualifications:

Understanding of statistical programming in a language such as R, SAS, or Python.

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Knowledge of statistical concepts such as regression, time series, mixed model, Bayesian, clustering, etc., to analyze data and provide insights

Bonus: Game theory is familiar to you.

Chief Staking Officer

(With proof of stake, crypto investors can participate in the blockchain consensus process by staking their tokens and earn a return.)

Job Description :

  • Identifying and qualifying new staking customers for our large-scale, fault-tolerant staking-as-a-service infrastructure.
  • Build staking partnerships with exchanges, custody providers, OTC desks, asset managers, and large financial institutions.

Qualifications:

2+ years of experience in business development at a crypto exchange.

You are well connected with crypto hedge funds, venture funds, hybrid/hedge funds, family offices.

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Bonus : You're ready to serve staking bots as well as human customers.

People's people

The decentralized world often needs a high level of coordination among employees and community members.

Head of Remote: shape and manage hybrid, remote teams.

Job Description:

  • Ensure that being remote is a competitive advantage.
  • Ensure our digital infrastructure is upgraded and adapted to our remote colleagues.
  • Influence and guide our company culture and habits of communications.

Qualifications:

5 years' recruitment related working experience in service industry.

Experience in high-growth startups.

Bonus:

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High EQ and leadership sense.

Grants & bounties lead

Job Description:

  • Create operational and marketing playbook for grants initiatives.
  • Logistical lead for hackathons in the US, Europe and Asia.
  • Work closely with the development teams to fund well-specified issue & coding tasks

Qualifications:

5+ years experience as a software engineer.

Well organized and great communication skills.

Bonus: Your log time on Gitcoin is greater than yours on GitHub

China community strategist (China presents great opportunities but requires special sensitivities.)

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Job Description:

  • Design and execute on crypto community strategy for the Chinese market, incorporating researched and learned best-practices.
  • Construct and manage a sustainable, autonomous internal translation pipeline for content, including website information, communications, and software documentation.
  • Own on-the-ground community activity in China by developing and implementing educational initiatives, events, and other programs.

Qualifications:

5+ years of community development experience in China.

Passion for Blockchain and crypto.

Able to address both trading and developer communities.

Bonus: You are a Wechat native.

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