Title: Project & Development Manager
Reports to: Zcash Community Grants (ZCG)
Engagement: Independent contractor (not employed by any grantee)
Location: Remote
The Zcash Community Grants (ZCG) program funds a growing portfolio of independent projects across the Zcash ecosystem. As the number of active grants scales, ZCG needs a dedicated Project & Development Manager to ensure each funded initiative stays on track, ships on time, and meets its milestones with quality.
This role sits between ZCG and the grantees — you are not an employee of any grantee team. Your allegiance is to the program's outcomes: clear specs, honest progress reporting, and early detection of problems before they become crises. You are the connective tissue that turns a collection of independent teams into a coherent, accountable portfolio.
- Work with ZCG and grantees to produce clear, unambiguous specification documents for each funded project or milestone.
- Translate grant proposals into concrete feature definitions — user stories, acceptance criteria, technical boundaries, and explicit out-of-scope items.
- Maintain a living spec that evolves with the project; flag scope creep early.
- Break milestone-level goals into well-defined, estimable work items.
- Ensure every feature has a clear definition of done before implementation begins.
- Collaborate with grantee technical leads to surface dependencies, risks, and sequencing trade-offs.
- Serve as the primary liaison between ZCG and each grantee team.
- Run regular sync meetings (weekly/biweekly) with grantees; produce concise meeting notes and action items.
- Relay ZCG priorities, feedback, and decisions to teams; channel team concerns and blockers back to ZCG.
- Facilitate cross-grantee coordination where projects overlap or share dependencies.
- Maintain a portfolio-level progress dashboard showing the health, velocity, and milestone status of every active grant.
- Track key metrics: burndown against milestones, open vs. closed issues, PR cycle time, and blocker count.
- Publish a weekly status digest for ZCG with a red/yellow/green health rating per project and a one-paragraph narrative on each.
- Ensure every grantee uses a consistent issue-tracking workflow (GitHub Issues, Linear, or equivalent) with clear severity, owner, and status fields.
- Monitor issue queues; escalate stalled or critical items.
- Maintain a project risk register — document risks, their likelihood/impact, mitigation plans, and trigger dates.
- When a project goes off-track, produce a concise exception report with root cause, corrective action, and an updated timeline within 48 hours.
- Define the quality bar for each deliverable: required test coverage, manual QA checklists, performance benchmarks, and security review gates.
- Coordinate QA efforts — whether by internal testers, community volunteers, or contracted QA — ensuring coverage before each release or milestone sign-off.
- Review test results and sign off (or reject) deliverables on ZCG's behalf before milestone payments are released.
| At 3 months | At 6 months | At 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboards live for all active grants | Every project has a current, actionable spec | Zero surprise misses across the portfolio |
| Consistent cadence of syncs and notes | Risk register populated and reviewed monthly | Grantee NPS > 50; ZCG trust in reporting is high |
| Issue-tracking standards adopted by all teams | First QA-coordinated milestone sign-offs complete | Repeatable playbook documented for onboarding new grants |
- 5+ years in project management, program management, or engineering management — open-source or blockchain-adjacent experience is a strong plus.
- Comfortable reading code and understanding technical architecture enough to challenge estimates and spot hand-waving — you don't need to commit, but you need to follow the conversation.
- Exceptional written communicator: your spec docs, status reports, and meeting notes are clear, concise, and actionable.
- Tool-agnostic but opinionated: you have workflows you trust (GitHub Projects, Notion, Linear, Jira, whatever) but you adapt to each team's stack rather than forcing a monolith.
- High integrity, low ego: you report bad news early, you don't sugarcoat, and you treat grantees as partners, not subordinates.
- Self-managing: ZCG is a lean organization. You will define your own rhythms, tools, and deliverables with minimal hand-holding.
- Compensation: Competitive contractor rate, commensurate with experience. Paid monthly against deliverables.
- Time commitment: Estimated ~15–25 hours/week, scaling with portfolio size.
- Term: 6-month initial engagement with renewal based on portfolio performance.
- Conflicts: You may not hold a concurrent role with any active ZCG grantee. This is a strict independence requirement.
Send a brief note, resume/CV, and two examples of past project artifacts you're proud of (a spec doc, a status dashboard screenshot, a risk report — anything that shows how you work) to [ZCG contact email].
ZCG is committed to building a diverse and inclusive ecosystem. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds, geographies, and walks of life.