Head of Security
Defuse Labs develops NEAR Intents to enable seamless cross-chain interactions in an automated world — connecting AI, services, and financial applications.
About Defuse Labs
At Defuse Labs we design intent-driven liquidity layers, where smart contracts breathe, AI transacts and chains sync in real-time With expertise in AI, cryptography, and decentralized finance, our team is redefining how intelligent agents interact across blockchain networks. Defuse Labs is pioneering NEAR Intents, a next-generation transaction framework designed to enable seamless, AI-driven financial interactions. By automating complex cross-chain operations, NEAR Intents empowers autonomous agents, smart contracts, and decentralized services to execute transactions efficiently and securely.
Skills
About the Role
You will be the Head of Security, taking primary ownership of security for Defuse Labs (NEAR Intents) and NEAR One, while extending your coverage to the NEAR Foundation and NEAR AI in partnership with their leadership. You'll pragmatically manage hard security risks across companies operating complex financial instruments in adversarial cross-chain environments, protecting against state actors, insider threats, and LLM agents across every chain the ecosystem integrates with. You'll build and run the security function from the ground up, balancing commercial tooling against open-source and in-house approaches, and you'll be the point of coordination and decision-making whenever incidents occur.
Requirements
- Proven security leadership experience from a major on-chain protocol, top-tier exchange or custodian, critical infrastructure, or a peer ecosystem operating at serious scale
- Experience building security programs, not just maintaining them
- Deep technical ability to read a Terraform module, challenge a threat model, and set budget priorities
- First-principles thinking about audit ROI and formal verification
- Strong system design skills including risk isolation, blast radius limitation, and circuit breaker design
- Fluency in crypto risk including smart contracts, on-chain forensics, MPC, key management, and validator security
- Ability to communicate composedly in public including incident disclosures, partner calls, and committee and board reporting
Responsibilities
- Define and operate end-to-end security posture across identity, cloud, endpoints, application security, and SecOps
- Own smart contract and protocol security standards, audit strategy, and release gating for production deployments
- Lead ecosystem-wide incident response including preparation, detection, containment, and recovery
- Design and oversee key management architecture across protocol, treasury, and operational environments including MPC and custody models
- Define and run a continuous offensive security testing strategy including internal testing, external audits, red teaming, and bug bounty programs
- Build a lean, high-leverage security team and decide on tooling approaches
- Establish security practices for AI and agent-based systems including model integrity, prompt injection risks, and agent execution boundaries