Remote CTO for Open Standards & Payments Protocol

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

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.