Sherlock is hiring a

Web3 Lead Designer

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.

Traditional blockchain security reviews are a good start, but it’s not enough. That's why Sherlock provides protocols with state-of-the-art, incentive-aligned audit contests, bug bounties and smart contract coverage.

Sherlock is the only security provider that includes a warranty after each audit. Sherlock customers get up to $500k of bug bounty and exploit coverage for the first month of launch after every audit.

Sherlock is also the only security provider 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, Cosmos, 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 financial 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 pure managers at Sherlock; everyone is in execution mode first and foremost.

Customer focus 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 leader in web3 audit. Sherlock regularly finds vulnerabilities that top teams miss and is almost never found in a situation where the reverse happens. 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 this gap even wider. See this link for a breakdown of why Sherlock audits are superior: https://docs.sherlock.xyz/audits/protocols 

However, Sherlock is not yet well-known to the broader crypto industry. Sherlock needs a recognizable personality and style that will build a lasting impression in people's minds over time. 

Sherlock has hosted the most audit contests in 2023 and 2024. But the vast majority of these audits have come to Sherlock from word of mouth and repeat customers. This is great, but there's an entire side to the business that's missing: coherent design and marketing. This is where you'll come in. When you land on Sherlock's website, it should be a memorable experience and drive customers toward working with Sherlock. When you see a tweet from Sherlock, it should stand out. Sherlock is not afraid to be bold, and is looking for people who are not either. 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 these three questions: What are the 3 most important principles of design that you hold dear? What is one product you love and what specifically makes the design great? Why should Sherlock select you over hundreds of other applicants?

Your role is:

**Take Sherlock's mission, principles, and aspirational customer experience and communicate it visually in everything Sherlock does.**

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

You'll need to have state-of-the-art design skills. Crypto is bold and cutting-edge. Sherlock is bold and cutting-edge. And you need to be bold and cutting-edge with your design. That means knowing the history of design styles in crypto and software in the last 5 years. And pushing those frontiers. 

You'll be expected to contribute on Day 1 in this role. It is important that you are familiar with crypto twitter and web3 in general. There are many differences -- some due to crypto's personality, others due to functional constraints.

You need to be product-focused. Sherlock believes the only path to consistently good design is a deep understanding of Sherlock's product and how it fits into the market. Sherlock believes a surface-level understanding of Sherlock's product will result in design outcomes that are inconsistent at best. If there is not a deep understanding of the product, then there is nothing to translate into design. 

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

- Creating the definitive guide to Sherlock's design (10x weight)

- Designing new marketing materials like social graphics, videos, ads and banners, presentations, and more alongside our Head of Marketing (5x weight)

- Improving and iterating on current designs, both with marketing materials and with the ux/ui (5x weight)

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

- Identifying new design needs that our current team has been missing the mark on (3x weight) 

Requirements

- Must have state-of-the-art design skills and evidence of pushing the frontier of design in some area

- Must have strong communication skills and the ability to iterate quickly on design concepts

- Must have a strong belief in the future potential of crypto

- Must understand and share the cultural values of Sherlock listed in "Sherlock's Culture" above

Nice to Haves

- Being able to actually build Sherlock's website in addition to designing it

- General programming knowledge

- You are crypto-native and understand the mentality of the "degen"

- Technical understanding of DeFi protocols under the hood

- Strong copywriting skills

- Prior experience in a marketing role outside of just design

What's in it for you

- You'll likely be the only designer at Sherlock for 6-12 months, so everything public-facing will be created by you

- Designs will be seen by hundreds of thousands of people (Sherlock's Twitter impressions were 2.4M last month)

- Attractive base (payable in fiat or crypto) + tokens/equity

- 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 (where relevant)

- Multiple offsites each year in places like France, Argentina, Portugal, etc.

- Root access to the decision-making process/criteria in all areas of Sherlock and the ability to work directly with the founders

- Ability to move quickly and get stuff done on a small, elite team that is already 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