Overview

Are you an experienced educator and leader who is passionate about architecting and implementing broad-scale technical education for world-changing technologies?  Are you passionate about building a better internet with community-driven innovation using blockchains? Are you an experienced leader who is excited about designing and operating a large, multi-pronged educational effort which spans across dozens of stakeholders and potentially millions of individual developers around the world?

As the NEAR Foundation’s Head of Education, you will drive the implementation and strategy of the full ecosystem-level education effort. Some specific programs will live within the Foundation and others will be driven by participants from across the ecosystem so you’ll need to think creatively and draw upon a wide range of channels and stakeholders to help out.  You will build and manage the NF education team and work with Education Guilds and embedded educators within outside teams as well.

Your mandate is large and there are considerable resources at your disposal.  As the Head of Education, you are ultimately responsible for crafting and delivering the outcomes of all of these programs to increase contribution to and usage of the NEAR platform.

To be successful, you’ll need to be a leader and a player-coach who can operate at the executive level, effectively as a founder and CEO of this unit within the NEAR Foundation.  You’ll need to be organized and tactical, employing strong strategic thinking and a good understanding of NEAR’s ecosystem. You should have demonstrated success in leading or building similar broad technical education efforts, for example at startups or open source projects offering developer-first products which require heavy community engagement and education programs in the past.  You should also be familiar with the zeitgeist of the crypto space and all the varied opportunities it uniquely provides to deliver and incentivize education.

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 a multi-pronged educational effort that spans training, certification, onboarding, docs, and broad scale awareness building through content.
  • Build out the team and best practices to manage and track OKRs & KPIs related to these programs, both internally and through coordination with external teams and funding mechanisms.

Key Requirements

  • Technical education experience required, blockchain experience strongly preferred
  • 10+ years of work experience in, and ultimately leading, technical education efforts at top tier businesses and/or projects. This can include founding successful startups of your own (we love founder DNA). You have built, led and managed teams of your own and worked within top quality leadership teams 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.