Account Executive

About Sherlock

Sherlock believes that a sound currency and functioning financial system should be basic human rights. Sherlock’s mission is to help create an open, uncensorable financial system that is secure enough for billions of people to trust with their life savings.

Smart contract auditing is a good start, but it’s not enough. That’s why Sherlock provides protocols with state-of-the-art, incentive-aligned audit contests as well as smart contract coverage.

Sherlock is the only audit provider that includes coverage after an audit. Sherlock customers get up to $250k of bug bounty and exploit coverage for the first month of launch after every audit. No other auditor includes any coverage.

Sherlock is also the only auditor to serve a customer’s full security needs, including collaborative audits, audit contests, bug bounties, and coverage.

Sherlock’s audit contests combine the best of traditional auditing with a competitive twist that results in hundreds of eyes looking at the codebase and some of the best security experts in the world surfacing issues that traditional audits miss.

Sherlock is the leader in auditing, running more public audits than any other provider last year. The Ethereum Foundation, Aave, Optimism, MakerDAO (now Sky) and the biggest crypto teams in the world choose Sherlock for their security needs.

Join Sherlock’s elite team on the ground floor, backed by some of the best Web3 and Silicon Valley VC firms such as Alliance, Archetype, IDEO, CoinFund, Lattice, Spartan, A Capital, and many others.

Sherlock’s Culture

Sherlock’s culture is fast-moving, intense, and not right for everyone. Here are some common attributes among historically successful team members at Sherlock:

Mission-focus

Anyone in this for reasons other than creating the best human coordination mechanism in history will either get too demotivated to last through multi-year bear markets or get too distracted during the frothy bull markets.

Willingness to work long, hard and smart

If Sherlock has any advantage, it is the willingness to work harder and think with more discipline than anyone else. This includes thinking from first principles about all important decisions and always thinking in tradeoffs and bets.

Owner mentality

Team members get ownership in Sherlock after a short time in this role, and each is expected to act like an owner of a Michelin-star restaurant where no detail is too small.

Builder mentality

Everyone at Sherlock is deep in the arena getting their hands dirty and this is a vulnerable position. There are no pure “idea people” or managers at Sherlock; everyone is in execution mode first and foremost.

Customer focus

The default assumption should be that the customer is always right and if the customer makes a mistake, it is Sherlock’s fault for not making the rules, UI or UX, etc. clear enough. It is too easy to sit behind a computer and build in an echo chamber. We must go out of our way to experience the customer’s viewpoint as often as possible.

Professional athlete mentality

Professional athletes opt in to a high-performance, meritocratic culture. This creates an environment that brings out the best in people and rewards each for their respective performance. But it’s also an environment where being in the 70th percentile in your role means you will have a short tenure on the team.

Comfort with directness and transparency

You must be comfortable giving direct feedback to others and receiving direct feedback yourself. “Not ruffling feathers” comes at the expense of moving in a suboptimal direction for too long. Sherlock is extremely transparent internally (and with customers) which means you can get involved in decisions made in any part of Sherlock.

The Role

Sherlock is the leading audit provider in Web3 security (by number of public audits in 2024). Sherlock regularly finds vulnerabilities that other top audit teams miss. And Sherlock is the only auditor willing to repay millions of dollars in the case of a missed exploit. The Sherlock team is working every day to improve the product and make our services even better.

However, the crypto ecosystem gets larger every day and Sherlock is not well-known by all teams. This is where Sherlock needs your help.

There are vast swaths of the ecosystem that have still never heard of Sherlock or don’t know why Sherlock is superior to other auditors. Every time a high-quality crypto project chooses an inferior auditor (instead of Sherlock) it holds the space back from its full potential and puts the life savings of end users at risk. If you’re serious about applying for this job and you’ve read this far, please email jack at sherlock dot xyz with 4-sentence answers to each of these three questions: In what ways have you creatively gotten in touch with people you wanted to meet in the past? Why will you be able to get connected to the best protocol teams in crypto? Why should Sherlock select you over hundreds of other applicants?

Your role is simple:

Find high-quality existing and up-and-coming protocol teams in crypto and convey the superiority of Sherlock audits to them.

Of course, in practice this role involves a lot of skills.

A strong understanding of DeFi and smart contract security is a plus, but it’s not needed to get started in this role.

You’ll need to be very skilled at both speaking and writing: Sherlock makes important decisions and weighs tradeoffs exclusively in written communication, and many protocol teams want to see a face and hear a voice before choosing an auditor.

You’ll need to find ways to get connected to decision-makers at high-quality teams in crypto, build relationships with them, and share the benefits of Sherlock with them.

With that in mind, the day-to-day responsibilities of this role include:

• Building relationships with decision-makers on these teams and sharing the benefits of Sherlock with them (10x weight)

• Sourcing and getting in touch with protocol teams (5x weight)

• Improving the pitch, tracking leads in the CRM, and working with the operations team to exceed each client’s expectations (5x weight)

• Being extremely hungry/driven and ready to wear a different hat on any given day to help Sherlock succeed (5x weight)

• Sourcing relationships with ecosystem teams and other parties to make sure Sherlock is a preferred partner for their ecosystem/collective (2x weight)

• Helping out with marketing/events/social media campaigns where relevant in order to get more inbound/attention for Sherlock (1x weight)

• Working to onboard protocol teams to Sherlock bug bounty and smart contract coverage once the audit phase is complete (1x weight)

Requirements

• Should have (or quickly develop) an edge at getting in touch with high-quality protocol teams
• Should be competitive and driven to succeed in bringing customers to Sherlock
• Should have a strong belief in the future potential of crypto
• Should understand and share the cultural values of Sherlock listed in “Sherlock’s Culture” above

Nice to Haves

• Some knowledge of crypto/engineering/auditing to converse with prospective customers
• Proficiency in Solidity/Python
• Proficiency in Solidity smart contract security

What’s in it for you

• Attractive base (payable in fiat or crypto) + uncapped commission + tokens/equity + benefits
• Flexible time-off policy
• Fully remote and flexible workstyle gives you the autonomy to live and work how you want
• Optional access to shared working space at your local WeWork or equivalent
• Great healthcare including dental
• Multiple offsites each year in places like Thailand, Colombia, Portugal, etc.
• There is no better place to build your dream network (everyone in crypto needs audits and Sherlock is the leader) and no better place to learn about new technologies
• Root access to the decision-making process/criteria in all areas of Sherlock and the ability to work directly with the founders
• Move quickly and get stuff done on a small, elite team that is making a big impact in the crypto space
• Play a huge role in defining the future of Sherlock and accomplishing the goal of making crypto/DeFi accessible to everyone