Job description
About the Ethereum Foundation
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is a global non-profit dedicated to supporting Ethereum’s long-term success. Our mission is to allocate resources to critical projects, advocate for Ethereum within the ecosystem, and promote its vision to the world.
About the Team and Role
The EF launched a new dAI Team focused on making Ethereum the global, decentralized settlement and coordination layer for AI. The team will define standards, support ecosystem builders, and lay the groundwork for open, censorship-resistant, and verifiable AI systems.
As AI Project Manager, you will help align protocol improvements, ecosystem initiatives, and external collaborations. This is a hybrid role that combines technical understanding with strategic coordination: part researcher, part program manager, part developer relations.
You’ll track what’s happening across the decentralized AI landscape, support projects building on Ethereum, and coordinate efforts so the community advances together rather than in silos. This coordination will include particular initiatives led by the dAI team, such as the recent ERC-8004 proposal, while also shaping the next wave of work. Areas of focus for coordination efforts include:
- Standardizing agent-to-agent protocols on Ethereum and aligning with adjacent specifications.
- Defining primitives for verifiable inference, decentralized compute, privacy and user-owned data.
- Coordinating across L2s, infrastructure projects, and applications/agents builders so that adoption compounds.
Key Activities
- Coordinate research and standards development (e.g., for agent payments, trust, privacy, A2A/MCP integration, open models).
- Engage with teams building AI infra and applications on Ethereum: understand their architectures, identify gaps, and connect them with EF resources.
- Organize and facilitate working groups, design discussions, and workshops across EF, L2s, and ecosystem partners.
- Synthesize community feedback and help shape specifications into stable proposals (EIPs/ERCs, Linux Foundation WGs, etc.).
- Collaborate with EF Ecosystem teams to support high-leverage decentralized AI projects.
- Map the decentralized AI landscape (agents, inference networks, data protocols, open source and web3-specific models and frameworks) and maintain an ecosystem view of active efforts.
Requirements
To excel in this role, you should have extensive hands-on experience building on Ethereum and/or AI—whether smart contracts, dApps, infrastructure, or AI tools, finetuning, inference, evaluations—and strong, well-informed opinions about how the AI ecosystem on Ethereum should evolve.
We’re looking for someone who can easily switch between high-level strategy and hands-on problem solving. You should feel confident working closely with technical teams, understanding how things are built, and contributing to decisions about how systems are designed and improved—with a data-driven mindset and good judgment.
Bonus points if you have experience managing resource allocation tradeoffs, leading technical initiatives across teams, or successfully identifying and acting on emerging technology trends before they become mainstream.
In summary:
- Deep interest in AI: agent systems, and decentralized protocols, with an understanding of why a trust layer such as Ethereum matters for AI.
- Background in Ethereum or Web3 ecosystems: Familiar with how Ethereum works and the broader ecosystem around it, with experience engaging with technologies like smart contracts, scaling solutions, or community standards.
- Familiarity with AI-agent protocols (A2A, MCP, x402) or adjacent standards, comfort learning new technical domains quickly.
- Excellent communication and coordination skills: able to convene diverse stakeholders and build consensus in open forums.
- Mindset: high ownership, collaborative, community-first; excited to work across ambiguous and fast-moving problem spaces.
How We Work
The EF isn’t a traditional workplace. We operate with autonomy, impact, and accountability. Most contributions are public by default, requiring proactive engagement, clear communication, and effective collaboration without direct authority. This role will demand clarity, rapid execution, and genuine commitment to Ethereum’s mission.
Contract Details
This is a full-time role. Our team is distributed across the globe and remote work from anywhere is possible—with most synchronous time from 2pm UTC onwards. For this role in particular, being located in San Francisco is a plus. There is no local office but the new local Ethereum hub (Ethereum House SF) is a fantastic place to co-work and connect with the community.
Some travel to events (Devcon, Devconnect, AI × Ethereum workshops) is expected.
Anons welcome to apply; pseudonymous work is possible, but KYC with EF is required.
