With our current hiring spree, it seems prudent to try to give a picture of our unusual, experimental pay structure.

Since our pay model is experimental, it is under constant revision, but it basically comes in three parts:

1. For full-time employees, called “role-based bounties” (RBBs), we supply a minimum guaranteed monthly payment of at least $6000 per month.
2. Anybody contributing to our development work (full time or not) is eligible for a share of $100k/month in milestone bounties. RBB salaries are deducted before payout (no double-dipping). These bounties are awarded by peer-review (everybody grades each other).
3. An additional bonus of “dev mastercoins” (dev MSC) are paid in proportion to the bounties earned in #1 and #2

Here is what our compensation looked like for the Month of February for ten people who did the bulk of the dev work:

Continue reading “Mastercoin Foundation Compensation” →

It’s becoming clear to me that we need someone dedicated to managing the hiring process at the Mastercoin Foundation (thanks Taariq for that tip!)

Here is a current list of the roles we need filled. Most of these do not have job descriptions yet, and some of these haven’t been internally approved – but it’s clear we are going to be on a hiring and interviewing spree at for the next couple of months.

I’d like to kick that off by finding someone dedicated who can help us manage the hiring process for these upcoming months. They don’t need to do it full-time, but they absolutely need to be super talented, amazingly fast learner of our needs and great communicator, experienced in hiring and interviewing for top tech startups, and at least superficially familiar with Bitcoin. If you know someone like that, please send them in.

Note that this is not an RBB position at this point, and doesn’t qualify for our usual $6000 referral bounty.

After completing our first three hires (Taariq, Dominik, and our yet-to-be-announced Chief Scientist), I want to let you all know that our focus, and my personal focus as Executive Director, is on hiring 6 full-time developers to start building this damn thing.

This is what we had in mind: We will hire two Lead Developers ASAP. These two leads will be Role Based Bounties with everything that implies. Their salary will be a monthly $6,000, with an added bonus of MSC each month, all calculated by the formula and terms described on github. Then, following our hiring plan, they will be tasked with building their teams – each of them is expected to hire two additional developers as full RBBs (same salary and conditions apply to all hires).

We will not micro-manage these teams and Lead Devs. The developers are expected to be self-sufficient, team players, and actively work towards building the Mastercoin infrastructure, clients, and whatever code is needed to make this vision come to life. You can come to us to ask for directions, but don’t rely on us – be independent and just do what you feel is in the best interest of Mastercoin. Some interesting projects up the pipeline is coding up a reference implementation AKA mastercoind, finishing the distributed exchange, and then following up to work on Smart Property and other advanced features. The developers are expected to cooperate with each other, with the lead scientist who will guide the evolution of the protocol, and with the relevant business needs like other organization requesting various features.

A quick note about outstanding bounties – any RBB will not qualify for outstanding bounties from the time he starts working as an RBB, but his team may still compete on such bounties. If a team wins a bounty, the team leader may allocate that bounty towards future developers / growth of the team / outsourced worked to 3rd party contractors. Any existing work that team members may have done before signing up as RBBs does count, and relevant bounties for that past work will be granted (e.g. as part of the 300 BTC contest).

We are looking everywhere – to existing developers, and newcomers – to come and join this effort. If you know of a world class developers with a passion for Bitcoin, please help us by recruiting him! Your participation and help will assist us to drive this process. Also feel free to post this job offering on various dev forums.

Please sent your resume to ron+jobs@mastercoin.org and CC info@mastercoin.org (we are working on setting up a jobs@mastercoin.org email address, but it’s not ready yet and I don’t want to wait). Also you should just put a meeting request on my meetme.so/RonGross page and ping me on skype (ripper234). Sadly my availability for the next two weeks will be very low, because of the SF and Vegas conferences, but please don’t let that stop you. Ping me after the conference if I haven’t replied to you, and just use meetme.so.

I’m so excited to this ramp up in hiring. Just 4 weeks ago we had zero full time employees, then I cam along, now we have 3 other employees, and hopefully within a month we’ll have at least 6 more employees. This project is really picking up speed!