Irreducible is a team of innovators pushing the boundaries of cryptographic computing. We challenge conventional wisdom, simplify complexity, and execute with precision to build category-defining technology. As we continue to scale, we are looking for a Director of Operations to own and optimize the critical functions that power our business — financial operations, legal, strategic planning...anything that comes up to ensure the company’s growth, profitability, and long-term success.
This role is designed for a highly analytical, execution-oriented, hands on leader who thrives in fast-moving environments, can navigate complexity with first-principles thinking, and is relentless about driving efficiency across the organization.
The Director of Operations will oversee financial operations, legal coordination, strategic procurement, and operational scaling. This role ensures that our operational infrastructure .
This person will work directly with CEO to streamline processes, optimize costs, manage external relationships with vendors, and drive high-impact strategies. This work is currently being done in a distributed way across multiple people, or not being done at all. We’re looking for this person to transform our operations to “best in class."
Our ideal candidate: Someone with a bias for execution, ready to roll their sleeves up and contribute in a hands on way. We hope those contributions could open the possibility of moving into the COO role if there's a mutual fit.
Role Location
- This role is based in Berlin. You must be located there, or open to relocation.
- Visa sponsorship: We do sponsor visas in certain cases! However, we aren't able to successfully sponsor visas for every role and every candidate. But if we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa, but we can't make any guarantees.
- You’ll need to be in the office three days per week, in addition to more on “as needed” basis. For example, if we have a week-long company offsite, you’ll need to be in the office the entire time.
Role Overview
Financial, Accounting, and Compliance Operations
- Oversee US/EU accounting, tax reporting, treasury management, and financial compliance, whether it be hands on or managing outsourced part-time employees.
- Financial planning and cost projections, building out dashboards to dynamically monitor operational costs
- Oversee key corporate announcements, PR strategy, and external messaging.
- Manage crypto assets, follow the market trends, maximize treasuries
- Equity: take role in ongoing equity management, such as managing shares, 409A valuations, or QSBS compliance.
- Oversee intellectual property (IP) portfolio, including trademarks and patents.
Strategic Scaling & Business Operations
- Plan and execute strategies for scaling infrastructure and operations, ensuring we can meet growth demands.
- Lead negotiations for data center contracts, vendor agreements, and supplier partnerships.
- Manage gear purchasing, warranties, insurance, and ongoing support contracts.
Among anything and everything else that may come up in running a business. No two days will look the same. This role is ideal for a strategic thinker and operational executor who thrives in scaling companies, optimizing financial operations, and leading high-impact projects. If this sounds like you, let’s talk! We recognize the right candidate might not have experience in every area. Please apply if you think you could be a fit, even if you don't meet all the criteria.
Role Qualifications
- 7+ years of experience in operations, finance, or a similar role in a high-growth technology company.
- An proven interest in web3, even if you don't have professional experience in the space.
- Strong general understanding of financial operations, legal and compliance, accounting, tax reporting, and financial planning for technology companies.
- Experience with scaling operations.
- Ability to manage complex projects with many stakeholders - here that might mean data center expansions, financial modeling, or strategic cross-functional initiatives.
- Proven track record of negotiating contracts, optimizing cost structures, and managing vendor relationships.
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience at a consulting firm such as McKinsey, BCG, or Bain could help someone excel in this role, bringing strategic problem-solving skills, analytical rigor, and a high-performance mindset.
- Experience working with the intricacies of a US company. If this isn't experience you have, it's something you'll have to learn on the job.
- Previous work in a hardware-heavy or infrastructure-dependent environments.
About us (Deep Dive):
We're building out a high-performance, cost-efficient compute stack for advanced cryptographic proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs. Verifiable computing with zk-SNARKs is taking off as a solution to the scalability and privacy limitations that today's blockchains suffer from. A new wave of blockchain protocols that use zk-SNARKs to prove smart contract executions, such as Polygon zkEVM, Starknet, and zkSync, are already in production. We believe there is a big market opportunity to generate proofs for these networks at scale in a cost-effective way [1]. There are lots of interesting performance engineering challenges we need to solve to keep up with the maximum device throughput.
We take the approach of co-designing hardware and software systems to accelerate SNARK generation end-to-end. Our first-generation tech stack uses FPGA accelerators running custom digital logic tailor-made for our use case [2].
We also conduct cryptography research to identify computationally efficient algorithms for verifiable computing. These research efforts produced a novel cryptographic construction based on towers of binary fields called Binius [3] [4], which we are currently developing into a production-grade system.
Our team has cross-domain expertise and includes hardware designers, low-level systems software engineers, cryptography engineers, and data center specialists, several of whom worked in HFT previously.
[1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/04/zk-hardware
[2] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/fpga-architecture-for-goldilocks-ntt
[3] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/binius-hardware-optimized-snark
[4] https://cointelegraph.com/news/vitalik-buterin-explains-binius-improve-zero-knowledge-proofs
[5] https://www.ulvetanna.io/news/introducing-ulvetanna
We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where talented individuals can thrive and grow. We value the different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds that each person brings to our team. Even if you don't fit 100% of the job's necessary qualifications, we'd still love to hear from you.
To all recruitment agencies: Irreducible does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Irreducible employees, or any other organisation location. Irreducible is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Please read our full policy here.
