Research Program Manager

Seeking program manager to assist Protocol Labs Research initiatives and support independent research-development labs across multiple disciplines. This includes collaborations, grants, outreach, publication, and other technical content review, hiring, and related efforts to improve research-development at PL.

Research at Protocol LabsWe’re not an ordinary Research Lab. We’re working hard to build the core protocols of the decentralized web pursuant to our vision for the future of the Internet. As part of our research team, you’ll be enabling outcomes at the forefront of our mission. Our research team is granted both the freedom to develop knowledge by working on novel applications and a responsibility to contribute those skills toward advancing the flagship projects of Protocol Labs and the research endeavors of leading institutions in the field. Our efforts range from supporting pure basic research to building agile, modular “research-development” labs dedicated to turning cutting-edge research into workable technologies. You’ll feel at home working with us if your knowledge and optimism enable you to craft creative solutions working around evolving needs.

As a Research Program Manager at Protocol Labs you will:

• Develop new programs to support and improve research across Protocol Labs and our ecosystem.
• Support researchers and research labs across Protocol Labs Research and Research-Development. This includes managerial responsibilities (1-on-1 meetings with researchers, involvement in cyclical performance reviews and feedback), programmatic improvements, collaboration building, and more.
• Provide technical content review for a subset of research-development labs, with possible focus on cryptography, consensus, cryptoeconomics, networking, or distributed systems.
• Coordinate with teammates across the Research, Legal, Comms, and Finance teams and with researchers and engineers in our projects and labs.
• Craft Protocol Labs’ presence in the research community by supporting researchers’ participation in high-profile conferences, expediting the results-to-publication pipeline, and otherwise improving the visibility and impact of Protocol Labs Research output.

Minimum Qualifications:

• MA/MSc degree in computer science, electrical engineering, or a related field.
• 2 years experience as a researcher in academia, industry, or government.
• Deep interest in scientific research.
• Demonstrated expertise coordinating action between parties with orthogonal drives.
• Excellent communication skills.
• An ability to think across research, product, and business considerations.

Highly-valued bonus points:

• PhD degree in a science or technology field.
• Experience managing or working in distributed research consortia.
• Experience applying for and managing research grants.
• Knowledge of how research labs are run and funded.
• Amazing cold email game.

What’s it like to work at Protocol Labs?

Protocol Labs mission is to improve humanity’s most important technology, the Internet. We build protocols, systems, and tools to improve how it works. Today, we are focused on how we store, locate, and move information. Our projects include IPFS, Filecoin, libp2p, and more.
As a distributed team, we hire anywhere in the world, and at various levels of experience (entry, senior, staff). We look for people with unique perspectives and diverse backgrounds.
We have a great benefits package, including parental leave, contributions to your retirement, competitive pay, and unlimited time off. For U.S.-based employees, we also provide platinum-level health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.