The OpportunityThe 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 roleYou 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
