VP, International Communications

SOLANA FOUNDATION; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Solana Foundation seeks a VP of Communications to own the global narrative and the network's reputation end to end. You will set core messages, build tier‑one media relationships across U.S.

business, financial, technology, and crypto press, and lead incidents and issues responses when the news cycle turns. This is a hands‑on role to craft the statement, guide executives, and design the system enabling a small team to operate at scale.

Qualifications

• 10–15 years in communications or a closely related field in high‑scrutiny environments
• Proven track record earning coverage on hard stories with proof and patience
• Experience building coalitions, consortia, or multi‑stakeholder initiatives
• Ability to hold technical conversations with engineers and translate for non‑technical audiences
• Strong relationships with tier‑one business, financial and technology journalists
• Comfort drafting statements and guiding executives through crisis scenarios

Responsibilities

• Own the global narrative and the network's reputation end to end.
• Build and maintain tier‑one media relationships across US business, financial, technology, and crypto press.
• Oversee incidents and issues responses, with disciplined escalation and messaging processes.
• Provide executive positioning and communications counsel to Foundation leadership.
• Translate protocol and governance changes for diverse audiences.
• Coordinate with Policy and Legal on regulatory moments and partnerships.

Skills

Media relations

Strategic storytelling

Crisis management

Executive communications

Stakeholder engagement

Public policy liaison

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Communications or related field

Job description

Who We Are

The Solana Foundation is a non-profit based in Zug, Switzerland, dedicated to the adoption, decentralization, and security of the Solana network. Solana is a high performance blockchain that can deliver a fast and friendly user experience, without sacrificing security. The Solana Foundation is working to realize a world where individuals own their data, use permissionless networks, and transfer information and value freely around the world. We are looking for talented people who are willing to jump right in and use their expertise to help the ecosystem build.

What We Do

The Solana Foundation's marketing and communications team tells the story of what is being built on Solana. We work across developers and founders, traders

and crypto-native users, institutions and capital-market participants, payments companies and merchants, enterprises and consumer platforms, and the policymakers and media who shape how all of it is understood. We are deliberately lean, fast, and close to the work.

The Opportunity

The people forming a view of Solana now include payments executives, asset managers, central bank staff, congressional offices and consumer press - audiences with no patience for jargon and a long memory for the network's early reliability problems. At the same time, the original audience of developers, validators and the extremely online will punish anything that reads as corporate. Holding both at once is the craft this role is hired for.

We are looking for a VP, Communications to own the global narrative and the reputation of the network end to end. You will set the handful of things Solana should be understood for, build the tier-one relationships that carry them, and own incidents and issues responses when the news cycle turns. This is a hands‑on role with a function to build behind it: you will write the statement, make the call, and design the system that lets a small team operate at the scale of a much larger one.

One thing to be clear about before you apply. The Foundation does not own the Solana network. We cannot direct the validator operators, the client engineering teams, the infrastructure providers or the loudest voices in the ecosystem, and we cannot issue a statement on anyone's behalf. The work is not message control. It is building the conditions in which an accurate story travels faster than an inaccurate one and enough trust across the ecosystem that independent parties choose to coordinate with you in the first hour of a bad day rather than the fourth.

To be Successful in this role

You will:

• Define and maintain a global narrative for Solana built around a handful of defensible claims, with the discipline to eliminate competing messages that dilute the story.

• Build and personally maintain tier‑one media relationships across U.S. business, financial, technology, and crypto‑native press.

• Own reputation and issues management across network incidents, client bugs, application‑layer exploits, validator disputes, and other high‑stakes moments, establishing severity tiers, named decision‑makers, rehearsed processes, and pre‑drafted response language.

• Provide executive positioning and communications counsel to Foundation leadership, including candid pushback when needed.

• Build a bench of credible external technical voices who can independently explain and advocate for Solana, recognizing that the most persuasive validation often comes from outside the Foundation.

• Provide communications support to ecosystem teams, including launch support, founder media training, and shared narrative infrastructure that smaller companies could not build independently.

• Translate protocol and governance changes for a wide range of audiences, from stake‑weighted voters and technical participants to readers with no prior understanding of validators or blockchain infrastructure.

• Coordinate with Policy and Legal on regulatory and legislative moments, including work alongside the Solana Policy Institute.

• Develop a measurement framework focused on narrative accuracy and reputation outcomes, including how accurately Solana is described in independently generated coverage and how quickly misinformation is corrected—not simply clip counts.

You ideally have:

• Roughly 10 to 15 years in communications, with meaningful time in a high‑scrutiny environment: a regulated industry, a platform under sustained press attention, a political or advocacy context, or a company that had a genuinely bad year and came through it

• Personal experience running a situation where the facts were unclear, the clock was running, and the wrong sentence would have made it worse

• Direct relationships with tier‑one business, financial and technology journalists, and a view on which four are worth real investment

• The ability to hold a technical conversation with engineers and come out with something true, accurate and repeatable by someone who does not understand it

• Experience earning coverage on a hard story with no news hook, using patience and proof rather than access

• A track record of operating with influence rather than authority: coalitions, consortia, federated organizations or open‑source projects

• Comfort as a hands‑on practitioner who would rather draft the statement than brief someone else to draft it

• Composure on the worst day, which is the single most predictive trait in this role

• Fluency with AI tooling as part of your working practice — for monitoring, research, drafting, message testing and adversarial review

Bonus points:

• Experience communicating a decentralized or multi‑stakeholder system you did not control

• You have told a principal no, given your reasoning, and kept the relationship

• Experience building a comms function rather than inheriting one

• You have opinions about what makes crypto communications mostly bad, and a view on how to do it better