Chief Technology Officer, x402

The Linux Foundation; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

Unlimited PTO

100% 401k match

Job summary

The Linux Foundation seeks a Chief Technology Officer for the x402 Foundation, driving technical direction and open standards collaboration across organizations. You will guide roadmap, conformance, and interoperability initiatives while representing the foundation to members, maintainers, and standards bodies.

As an impactful IC, you will have potential to grow a technical team, with a fully remote, international footprint and a compensation package reflecting senior leadership responsibilities.

Qualifications

• Deep experience designing or implementing internet protocols, payment systems, or financial APIs.
• Familiarity with HTTP semantics, authentication flows, and settlement models.
• Experience leading open source initiatives and defining community strategy.
• Experience building conformance, interoperability, or certification programs for specifications.
• Data-driven operations: defining project health metrics and dashboards.

Responsibilities

• Represent the Executive Director on technical matters with members and maintainers.
• Lead onboarding, governance, incubation, lifecycle management for new open source projects and working groups.
• Define roadmap goals, track technical deliverables, remove blockers, drive velocity across repositories.
• Scope, select, and manage technical contractors and vendors; define statements of work and budgets.
• Engage in architecture discussions, API standardizations, and release management.
• Design, launch, and run the conformance program with tests and certification criteria.
• Drive interoperability between x402 and adjacent protocols and standards.
• Liaise with external standards bodies like IETF, W3C, and ISO.
• Define and publish project health metrics and adoption dashboards.

Skills

Protocol & Payments Architecture

Agentic & Web3 Fluency

Code & Spec Literacy

Executive & Community Presence

Ecosystem Awareness

Education

Technical Master's degree

Job description

Chief Technology Officer, x402 Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a 501(c)(6) non-profit that provides a neutral, trusted hub for developers and organizations to code, manage, and scale open technology projects and ecosystems.

The x402 Foundation is the vendor-neutral home of the x402 protocol, an open standard that embeds payments directly into web interactions. Built on the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, x402 lets AI agents, APIs, and applications exchange value as easily as they exchange data. The Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation in April 2026. Together with a broad community of payment networks, cloud providers, and developers, we are building an open, interoperable payments layer for the internet.

Job Description

We are looking for a technical leader to serve as CTO for the x402 Foundation. This role requires a rare blend of deep payments and protocol architecture expertise and experience leading open standards work across many organizations.

In this position, you will be the technical representative of the Executive Director and a key technical voice to members, maintainers, and external standards bodies. You will publish the projected x402 technical roadmap, stand up the conformance program, and drive integrations with adjacent protocols so that x402 works across the agentic and web payments ecosystem.

You will work directly alongside the Executive Director, foundation staff, Technical Steering Committee, Working Group chairs, and protocol maintainers to set technical direction, track progress against goals, and report on project health and spec adoption.

This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Executive Director. As the foundation grows, the scope may expand to include building and managing a technical team.

Key Responsibilities

• Executive Director Technical Representative: Represent the Executive Director on technical matters with members, maintainers, the Technical Steering Committee, and the press. Translate technical decisions into clear guidance for business and governance stakeholders.
• Project & Working Group Lifecycle: Lead the onboarding, governance structure, incubation, lifecycle management, and graduation phases for new open source projects and working groups.
• Technical Milestone Acceleration: Partner directly with Working Group and Project Chairs to define roadmap goals, track technical deliverables, remove blockers, and drive consistent velocity across code repositories.
• Technical Contractor & Vendor Management: Scope, select, and manage technical contractors and vendors engaged by the foundation, such as security audit firms and bug bounty platforms. Define statements of work, track deliverables against budget, and ensure findings are triaged and resolved with maintainers.
• Hands-on Technical Facilitation: Engage deeply with architecture discussions, API standardizations (e.g., tool-calling protocols, memory layers, multi-agent communication), and release management.
• Conformance Program: Design, launch, and run the x402 conformance program, including test suites, certification criteria, and the process implementers follow to demonstrate specification compliance.
• Cross-Protocol Integrations: Drive interoperability between x402 and adjacent protocols and standards, such as agent-to-agent communication, tool-calling, identity, and existing payment rails. Maintain vendor neutrality across all integrations.
• Standards Body Liaison: Serve as the foundation's interface to external standards bodies and peer foundations, such as IETF, W3C, and ISO working groups. Coordinate contributions and maintain consistent positions.
• Project Health Metrics: Define and publish project health metrics, including contributor activity, release cadence, issue and PR throughput, and security posture, using LF tools such as LFX.
• Spec Usage Metrics Dashboard: Build and maintain a dashboard of specification adoption and usage, with every figure dated and sourced, to inform roadmap priorities and member reporting.
• Process & Tooling Alignment: Deploy LF tools such as LFX to track contributor analytics, security compliance, project health, and PMO operations across all foundation initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications

Technical Acumen & Architecture Experience

• Protocol & Payments Architecture: Deep experience designing or implementing internet protocols, payment systems, or financial APIs; familiarity with HTTP semantics, authentication flows, and settlement models
• Agentic & Web3 Fluency: Solid understanding of how AI agents call tools and services (e.g., Model Context Protocol and agent-to-agent protocols) and of stablecoin and blockchain-based settlement
• Code & Spec Literacy: Comfortable writing and reviewing specifications, RFCs, reference implementations, and test suites in at least one mainstream language such as TypeScript, Go, Python, or Rust

Standards & Program Leadership

• Standards Body Experience: Track record of contributing to or chairing work in standards bodies such as IETF, W3C, ISO, or EMVCo
• Conformance & Certification: Experience building conformance, interoperability, or certification programs for a specification with multiple independent implementations
• Data-Driven Operations: Experience defining project health and adoption metrics and building dashboards using tools such as LFX, GitHub insights, or similar platforms

Leadership & Influence

• Vendor-Neutral Consensus Building: Expertise in building consensus among competing companies and community members who do not report to you, while keeping the foundation neutral
• Executive & Community Presence: Ability to engage VP- and CTO-level stakeholders at member companies while staying closely connected to maintainers and individual contributors
• Ecosystem Awareness: Deep familiarity with trends and emerging standards across agentic AI, open payments, and digital assets

Education & Experience

• Technical Master's degree
• 15+ years leading global open source initiatives and defining community strategy

Additional Information

Salary $200,000 - $285,000 USD

The Linux Foundation is an all-remote workforce that hires world-class talent. We are as passionate about providing a flexible and supportive work culture as we are about open source software. Collaboration is in our DNA, and we pride ourselves on being able to work closely together while not being tied to an office. We offer exceptional benefits including top-of-the-line healthcare plans, unlimited PTO, and 100% 401k match up to the IRS-defined limit per year.

The Linux Foundation is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position. Candidates must be authorized to work in their country of residence without employer sponsorship, now or in the future.

The Linux Foundation is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

The Linux Foundation is a neutral, trusted hub for developers and organizations to code, manage, and scale open technology projects and ecosystems.