CTO Advisor (Crypto-Native) at Token Metrics – Austin, Texas

CTO Advisor (Crypto-Native)

Were seeking a hands-on CTO Advisor to stabilize reliability (stop regressions, reduce Sev-1s), install a lightweight SDLC/SRE/MLOps cadence, and leave behind simple runbooks and dashboards the team can operate.
This is an advisor role (not a line-manager): you design gates, coach leads, and facilitate incident and release hygiene.
Type: Advisor (contract)
Time: 1020 hrs/week (90 days), then 24 hrs/month Comp: Equity + $TMAI only (no cash) Reporting to: CEOLocation: Austin preferred; open to remote (US/EU/APAC time-zones)What Youll Do (Responsibilities)

• Establish release gates in CI/CD (tests/coverage, static checks, feature flags, canary/shadow) and clear rollback/kill-switch triggers.
• Implement SRE fundamentals: 35 SLOs (e.g., data freshness, job success rate, API latency/availability, exception closure time) with an error-budget policy.
• Enforce Change & Exceptions Logs; drive post-mortems (Sev-1/2) with action items and owners.
• Pair with Quant to harden AI index safety (model/versioning, parity tests, drift/health alerts).
• Produce concise runbooks & dashboards; coach engineering leads; hand back the system.

What You Wont Do (Scope guardrails)

• No day-to-day people management or sprint ownership.
• No wallet signatory or payment approvals.
• No changes to liquidity or emissions policy (owned by the $TMAI council).

Qualifications

• Must-have

• 4+ years leading engineering in crypto (protocol/DeFi, exchange, market/data infra, or comparable).
• Proven SDLC/DevOps/CI-CD and SRE practice (SLOs + error budgets + incident response).
• Experience shipping data/ML systems or MLOps basics (versioning, parity tests, safe rollout).
• Excellent technical writing and async collaboration.

• Nice-to-have

• Smart-contract security/audit handoffs; keys/secrets/multisig hygiene.
• Prior work with index/market-data pipelines or exchange connectivity.

Success Metrics (first 90 days)

• Reliability: measurable reduction in failures (e.g., Sev-1/MTTR 20%; regression escapes 30%).
• Hygiene: 100% prod changes pre-logged; Sev-1 post-mortems with actions 72h; SLOs live and reported monthly.
• Adoption: release gates and runbooks in use by named owners without advisor involvement.

Collaboration

• Operating Chair (monthly business review), Quant (AI indices), $TMAI observers (liquidity dependencies), Finance & Controls (audit evidence).

How to Apply

• Share:

• 1) a redacted SLO doc you authored
• 2) a redacted incident/runbook you wrote, 3) two sentences on your biggest reliability turnaround and the gate you added afterward.

About Token MetricsToken Metrics builds AI-driven on-chain indices and analytics. Our goal is to make crypto investing simple, reliable, and institution-grade. Were shipping AI-automated indices, integrating with venues like Pendle/DEX/CEX, and preparing for public-markets readiness.