Senior Microeconomist

Reserve
Oakland - United States
S: $100k+, depending upon fit

DESCRIPTION
Summary: We're looking for an experienced applied microeconomist with demonstrated skill at designing complex incentive mechanisms to lead our stabilization protocol development team. We are open to short-term, contract work for exceptionally skilled candidates.


What We're Doing

Everyone's money should be secure. Unfortunately, due to broken financial and monetary institutions around the world, billions of people don't have access to basic financial services like a trustworthy savings account. We're trying to change that.

Reserve is a blockchain-based, decentralized currency that is always worth $1, is cheap to transfer, and provides its users access to basic financial services. While Reserve is valuable to traders and app developers inside the crypto ecosystem, we're most excited about it replacing inflationary currencies and dysfunctional banks. And with the currencies in Venezuela, Iran, Argentina, Turkey, and elsewhere approaching hyperinflation, now seems like the right moment for people to choose something new.

Decentralized currencies have the opportunity to change global financial and monetary institutions for the better. If you're excited by this idea, we would love to hear from you.

If you'd like to learn more, check out this recent interview of our CEO Nevin Freeman on the podcast Hidden Forces: https://www.hiddenforces.io/podcast/show/hard-prob....


Your Role

Designing a self-stabilizing, decentralized currency is a formidable incentive engineering challenge. Our CTO Matt likens it to playing poker against the entire market while everyone can see your hand. There are many disaligned parties that have to be coordinated through decentralized incentive mechanisms, including traders, the owners of our two tokens, arbitrageurs, and more.

As lead microeconomist, you will take over from our CTO Matt in owning the economic design and development of the protocol that stabilizes the value of our currency, the Reserve. (You'll be freeing Matt to direct additional focus to other parts of the company.) While the core economic design is mostly complete, we still need to verify the protocol design and figure out low-level components. We also intend to pursue major design projects in the future including decentralized governance. You would lead these efforts.

You will be specifically responsible for:
1. Leading, managing, and scaling the protocol team.
2. Determining high-level goals and directions for protocol development.
3. Directly working on protocol design. Before our launch, protocol work will be focused on verification of our core economic design. After launch, work will be primarily focused on governance design.
4. Writing both technical and persuasive documents describing our protocol and arguing why it will work.


REQUIREMENTS
1. You have direct experience applying microeconomic knowledge to the analysis and design of incentive systems in the real world.
2. You are able to think systematically and literally about formal systems and can spot every minor problem in a system that most people would gloss over.
3. You are able to track high-level priorities while simultaneously working on detailed, technical problems. You don't get lost in the weeds.
4. You are comfortable managing and scaling a team.


BENEFITS
• Competitive compensation with the ability to customize cash versus equity.
• A beautiful office with views in Oakland. Excellent restaurants and coffee shops right down the street.
• Health insurance coverage.
• Free gym membership.
• Well stocked kitchen, including catered meals, drinks and snacks.


A final note: In your cover letter, please explain why you'll succeed at the incentive design challenge, expanding upon any relevant previous experience if applicable. If you really want to impress us, also tell us about something we got wrong or that we missed in our analyses of MakerDAO or Basis.

Job summary