The Up Next Company

Security Engineer

• Build and own XMTP’s comprehensive security strategy across internal, cyber, travel, and executive domains.
• Establish a layered defense model aligned with our mission: *secure the world’s freedom to communicate.*
• Create high-clarity frameworks for risk, readiness, response, and prioritization.
• Present strategy and risk assessments to leadership, investors, and external partners.
• Define and enforce device, tooling, authentication, and access standards.
• Oversee MDM, hardware key enforcement, internal permissions, and secrets management.
• Implement systems that assume compromise and minimize blast radius.
• Own security elements of onboarding and offboarding while partnering with our Ops team for execution.
• Lead the digital defense of XMTP’s engineering, infrastructure, cloud systems, and protocol interfaces.
• Own threat detection, incident response, monitoring, and vulnerability management.
• Partner with Engineering to harden production environments, CI/CD pipelines, and secure key material.
• Ensure best-in-class security tooling across endpoints, authentication, and encryption.
• Architect the travel security program for staff attending conferences, hackathons, and high-risk environments.
• Build protections against proximity attacks, in-person targeting, device cloning, and social engineering.
• Standardize travel kits (Faraday protection, privacy screens, secure bags) and protocols.
• Train employees for situational awareness and safe operating procedures on the ground.
• Develop protocols for device hardening, travel safety, communications security, and identity protection for high-profile individuals.
• Establish response plans for impersonation, targeted phishing, and other executive-focused threats.
• Partner with Brand and People Operations to embed security into XMTP’s identity - swag, onboarding, systems, and storytelling.
• Ensure every internal and external interaction signals XMTP’s security-first culture.
• Drive company-wide education that raises awareness and reinforces safe practices.
• Select and manage external security firms, penetration testers, and threat intelligence partners.
• Own contracts, performance, budgets, and strategic evaluations.
• Establish relationships with industry experts and security communities.
• Maintain all security documentation:
• Incident response
• Travel protocols
• Device standards
• Engineering security guidelines
• Internal training
• Run tabletop exercises and simulations to test readiness.

Head of Security

Engineer

Join Ephemera, Build the Future of Onchain Messaging
Lead design, development, and maintenance of mission-critical blockchain systems focused on tokenomics
Own end-to-end lifecycle of smart contracts: architecture, implementation, audits, deployment, upgrades
Write and deploy smart contracts governing the economics of the XMTP protocol
Design novel incentive models to reward offchain node operators and collect messaging fees
Lead development of complex token contracts: ERC-20, staking, governance, vesting, distribution, liquidity management
Architect upgradeable contracts using proxy patterns for safe, controlled change management
Champion security best practices, lead internal reviews, coordinate third-party audits, implement continuous monitoring
Manage large-scale funds in production ensuring availability, integrity, and protection of treasury and user assets
Partner with economics, product, and legal to translate tokenomics into deployable contracts
Establish engineering best practices, mentor engineers, raise the bar for security, efficiency, maintainability

Head of Security

Staff Smart Contracts Engineer