Head of Cryptography

About Montauk Capital

Montauk Capital is an investment management platform that spans venture investing and venture studio efforts that builds and invests in capital in category leading companies. We focus on backing tech companies in the ‘Electron Economy,’ the massive shift toward software-enabled industrial and energy systems. This generational transition is reshaping how we power intelligence, move people and goods, and build resilient industries. From AI, data centers and Web3 to industrial robotics and re-shoring supply chains, the future of growth is built on electrification and the intelligent use of energy.

About Zero Proof

Zero Proof is an emerging venture currently in development through Montauk Capital’s studio.

Currently, enterprises are adopting autonomous agents at scale; security incidents are rising without cryptographic verification of identity/intent. The market monitors agent behavior after the fact.

Zero Proof is building a scalable trust platform that verifies agents at the developer, enterprise and infrastructure level. Our mission is to make multi-agent commerce safe, transparent and scalable. Enterprises are adopting autonomous agents at scale; security incidents are rising without cryptographic verification of identity/intent.

About the Head of Cryptography Role

As Head of Cryptography and co-founder, you will own the cryptographic strategy and implementation of Zero Proof’s verification layer to attest agent identity, capabilities, and policy-bounded actions. This is a hands on role that will design and deliver the cryptographic and proof systems that make agent actions verifiable, privacy-preserving, and low-latency in production.

What You’ll Do

• Assess current prototype: architecture, data flow, threat model, 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 with agents lacking current standards
• Establish key management, access control, and secure data handling

What You’ll Bring

• Owner’s mindset: we’re building this together
• Obsession of cryptography and bringing verification to the agent economy
• Love for hands on building and discovering new ways to do things
• Team mentality, we work closely and collaboratively
• Cryptography and tech community engagement
• 7–10+ years in applied cryptography / protocol engineering with shipped production systems.
• Hands-on Rust (systems, ownership/borrowing model; perf profiling).
• Practical ZK experience (circuit/protocol design or integrating ZK frameworks) and strong standards-based crypto (TLS/JOSE/HPKE, key lifecycle, KMS/HSM).
• Cloud production chops: EKS/K8s, Terraform or AWS CDK, GitHub Actions, cloud networking (VPC, ingress, service mesh, secrets).