Simon CryptoRecruit

HIRING Crypto, AI and Blockchain jobs - Building Teams! Founders and Hiring Managers - LFG!

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

@LoganTGott OUTBOUND

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

@LoganTGott SYSTEM

[Aariv Khanna @AarivKhanna]

If you died tomorrow your family could not access a single thing you own digitally.

Bank accounts. Crypto. Passwords. Cloud storage. All of it locked permanently.

Here is how to fix that in 30 minutes:

[MartyParty @martypartymusic]

You were taught crypto very poorly.

Public blockchains are global supercomputers.

Anyone anywhere in the world can run a program on them and anyone in the world can use the program.

Bitcoin supercomputer only runs the Bitcoin ledger.
Solana supercomputer can run any Rust program.
SUI supercomputer can run any Move program.
Ethereum supercomputer can run any Solidity program.

The supercomputers are constructed as a distributed set of nodes all around the world and are connected via physical networks to act as one. To stop the supercomputer you have to stop all the nodes all around the world.

To run programs on the supercomputers requires gas tokens or "native" tokens to the particular supercomputer. To use the programs the user requires these tokens. These tokens are public and can be used as currency on the supercomputers. Examples of "native execution network" tokens are $BTC, $SOL, $SUI, $ETH.

Note: No different from running a AI LLM supercomputers which also requires tokens to run but LLM tokens are not yet tradable or public and represent one word of a AI query.

Bitcoin does not have the ability to run arbitrary programs, it only runs the Bitcoin ledger. This means it is not an "execution network". An "execution network" can run arbitrary programs that represent functionality or other token ledgers. Solana, SUI and Ethereum are examples of "execution networks" and are typically called Layer 1 execution networks because they can execute user programs.

Now understand all other "tokens" or "crypto" are just programs running on one of these "execution network" supercomputers. StableCoin like USDC or USDT are just programs running on each of the supercomputers. Defi applications and DEX's are just programs running on the supercomputers. Meme coins are just programs running on an "execution network". Anyone can run a program and anyone can use the program.

Now you can imagine how these global supercomputers that store and run programs will be used by everyone, institutions and governments will run everything on them and an entire agentic infrastructure will use them.

Start to learn what crypto really is. Understand you were PURPOSEFULLY taught it incorrectly. You were the early testers of the supercomputers. Everything we see in crypto today can be thought of as a test.

Together with AI these supercomputers will run the world.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

Or could be phototropism, trees growing in direction of prevailing light source, due to low sun in winter skies in eg south of South Island of New Zealand.
Also, same tree types on the plain aren’t blowing.
Maybe a hill obscuring regular sun just to left of picture?
Common sight.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

@HealthRanger No logic error if this in south of South Island of New Zealand where trees grow towards the light source.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

You didn’t “fail” the final round. You lost the comparison.
After 20+ years as a headhunter, I can tell you most hiring decisions aren’t about you in isolation.

They’re about how you stack up against the other 2-3 in the final round.

You might be strong, likeable, capable, a great culture fit.
But if someone else has already done the role at a peer-or-better rival, needs almost no onboarding, or just somehow feels “safer”…

They look like less risk.
They get the offer.

Final discussions often sound like:
“Out of these solid candidates, who is the safest bet?”

So, you can do everything right and still miss out.

Don't think “What did I do wrong?” You don’t have enough information to answer that properly - and you’ll rarely be told the real reason anyway.

Was it timeline to becoming productive?
Perceived flight risk?
Stronger brand on the CV (covering the hiring manager if it doesn’t work out)?

Hiring isn’t purely on merit. It’s often risk management.
So don’t beat yourself up. It isn’t personal.
Move on.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild.

5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals.

The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today.

The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century.

People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable.

60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.

[vegastar @vegastarr]

Prague Astronomical Clock ⏳✨

Installed In 1410.
Still Running Today.

It Measures Babylonian Time
And Old Bohemian Time 🕰️
And Displays The Movements Of The Sun, Moon & Zodiac ☀️🌙♈

One Of The Oldest Astronomical Clocks On Earth
And The Oldest Still In Operation.

No Spinning Globe Needed.
Just Cycles, Geometry, And A Fixed Plane. 👁️⚙️

Ancient Timekeeping Was Precise.
And It Tells A Different Story Than We Were Taught.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

HIRING!  Urgent hires for Jan-Feb start:
* CFO - AI Private Compute US$250-300k base + tokens
* Commercial Director for Crypto Events $200k
* Tokenization Head - RWA, focus on Real Estate for Dubai-base - substantial
* Forward Deployed Engineers - for assessing AI and Blockchain needs for client companies to US$220k Base + equity + bonus
* Rust Engineer for Solana infra - EST hours $240k + bonus + equity
* Rust APIs expert - US/CAN/Western Europe $220k perm Contractor
* Perps DEX SWE - AMM and liquidation engineer expert for Austin TX  $200k + equity
* Cryptographer - has shipped privacy features  $280k + tokens
* Avalanche-experienced Protocol Lead to build private blockchains $350k + equity
* Golang expert for Stablecoin infra $250k - US + bonus + equity
* Product Design roles in SF and NYC - AI startups
* Lead Blockchain Data Engineer: Build the multi-chain data infra from scratch; petabyte-scale pipelines.
* Lead Onchain Quant Researcher: Turn raw onchain data into indicators, patterns, and classification heuristics.
* Lead Data Scientist (ML): Build production ML for clustering, classification, and anomaly detection across 300M addresses.
* Lead Quant Analyst (Market Data): Build signals from order flow + order books; fuse with onchain data.
Lead Crypto Markets Analyst: Lead research & forecasting; run the market analysis function and output.

Only considering candidates with a verifiable track record in top-tier names - DM me with your LinkedIn and brief deal/build highlights.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

@HavenXHV Hi there, if any Haven cryptographers didn't land a role, I have a Co-Founder role with a new project - seeking a Head of Cryptography - AI Agent focused. Pls DM me.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

Hiring: Head of Cryptography & Co-Founder - ZK-Proofs for Autonomous Agents
Problem:
Enterprises are rolling out autonomous agents everywhere… and the attack surface is exploding. Right now, most companies only “monitor” agent behavior after something goes wrong.
Mission:
My client is creating a scalable trust layer that verifies who an agent is and what it intends to do - at the dev, enterprise, and infra levels. The mission is simple: make multi-agent commerce safe, transparent, and scalable.

We’re thus seeking a Head of Cryptography & Co-Founder who can turn this from prototype to production.

What you’ll do:
• Assess our current prototype across architecture, data flow, threat model, and business priorities
• Define cryptographic boundaries: what must be encrypted, authenticated, key-managed
• Separate performance-critical vs trust-critical components
• Design and implement core primitives and protocols
• Integrate cryptography with agents that currently lack standards
• Establish key management, access control, and secure data handling
Location; Remote, but you must be based in US or Canada

If you fit the bill, DM me.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

HIRING! Offensive Security Engineer - Web3 penetration testing and Bug Bounty program management. US Remote role with top US CEX

See my post on LinkedIn

[CryptoRecruit @cryptorecruit]

Capital Raising BDM – Crypto Venture Fund | Dubai
We’re working with a fast-growing crypto venture fund, backed by leading players and delivering standout results. They’re seeking a Senior Business Development Manager Capital Raising to drive investor engagement and fundraising

[Alex Vacca @itsalexvacca]

Out of 9,000 companies at YC, only 164 (1.82%) went on to become unicorns.

Whereas the hit rate for Thiel Fellowship is 13.79% (40 out of 290 companies became unicorns).

These companies together control >$220 Billion in market cap. The question is how?

Thread

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

HIRING ! Memecoin Launch app iOS Design Engineer
Solana memecoin launch app with a solid track record to-date - seeking a Frontend iOS Design Engineer for this US or Europe-based remote role

We're seeking a Design Engineer with serious iOS experience - someone who can translate cutting-edge designs into beautiful, high-performance user interfaces across iOS and web.

* Strong in design tools like Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD

* Strong skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and a modern frontend framework

* Extensive experience with iOS development - production grade, ideally shipped apps

* A track record of converting mockups into clean, responsive, production-grade code

Fast-paced role for someone who wants to help shape UX in the onchain world. DM me with evidence, and let's chat.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

HIRING! Solana Validator BD Lead (remote - open globally)
One of the more technically ambitious teams building on Solana is hiring a Validator BD Lead.
You’ll own validator engagement from end to end: onboarding top operators, shaping incentives, and navigating deep infra conversations (Sidecars, slot auctions, SIMDs).

Ideal profile:
– 3–5+ yrs in validator-facing roles
– Infra or staking BD at a top validator, RPC, or L1
– Deep Solana context + relationships
– Fluent in incentives, risk, and performance tradeoffs

Big scope. High trust. Solana-native required.
DM me to learn more or refer someone excellent.

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

@juleshorn01 L-Theanine in combo is pristine

[Simon CryptoRecruit @SiCryptoRecruit]

Hiring: Onchain Bank Head of Finance / CFO
We're still seeking a Head of Finance to help build financial infrastructure (Dubai or Europe remote)

This online, onchain bank merges crypto and traditional finance into one platform.
The role is high-impact for a proven CFO, VP Finance, or Head of Finance with crypto and ideally prior fintech or banking experience.
Startup experience highly preferred.

Key focus areas:
Treasury & liquidity management (fiat + crypto)
Revenue operations, reconciliation & automation
Financial systems architecture & regulatory compliance
Executive-level strategy & board reporting
Fast-paced, high-growth environment

If you or someone in your network is ready to lead financial strategy at one of the most ambitious DeFi / Fintech projects out there - DM me or comment below.