About IPNI The InterPlanetary Network Indexer (IPNI) is a core piece of decentralized data infrastructure. It maps billions of content identifiers (CIDs) to providers, enabling CDN-like retrieval performance across IPFS and Filecoin. As adoption accelerates, large-scale users are now ready to pay for IPNI’s reliability, scale, and integration—creating the need for dedicated leadership to guide IPNI from critical infra project into a sustainable, high-impact platform.

The Role We’re seeking a CEO to drive IPNI’s next phase: scaling adoption, building sustainable revenue models, and ensuring the engineering roadmap tightly aligns with user needs. This is a hybrid role spanning product leadership, business development, technical program management, and community stewardship. You’ll be the connective tissue between core engineers, paying customers, and the broader IPFS/Filecoin ecosystem—charting the path for IPNI to become the default content routing layer of the decentralized web.

What You’ll Do

• Product Leadership: Translate user and ecosystem needs into clear priorities for the engineering team. Balance reliability, performance, and new feature development with long-term sustainability.
• Business Development & Growth: Build relationships with large-scale IPNI users (retrieval clients, SPs, web3 infra providers). Structure pricing, contracts, and partnerships that align IPNI’s growth with ecosystem success.
• Technical Project Management: Ensure the eng team delivers on roadmap goals, with crisp specifications, milestones, and cross-team coordination (Lotus, Boost, libp2p, IPFS).
• Community & Ecosystem Engagement: Manage a diverse set of stakeholders—developers, SPs, partners, and open-source contributors—through active communication, governance, and collaboration channels.
• Sustainability & Strategy: Chart a clear path toward long-term financial sustainability while preserving IPNI’s role as a core open infra project.

What We’re Looking For

• Proven leadership in scaling early-stage products or infra projects into sustainable businesses.
• Strong product sense with technical fluency—comfortable diving into distributed systems concepts, APIs, and developer needs.
• Experience in business development, partnerships, or ecosystem growth (ideally in infra, cloud, or web3).
• Operational excellence in managing cross-functional teams and large communities of users.
• Entrepreneurial mindset: scrappy, ambitious, and able to balance near-term execution with long-term vision.
• Passion for decentralized infrastructure and making IPFS/Filecoin scale to billions of users.

Why Join This is a rare chance to lead a critical piece of the decentralized web. As IPNI’s first CEO (as the project grows from OSS technology to growing startup), you’ll set the vision, grow adoption, and shape how billions of files are discovered and retrieved. You’ll work alongside world-class engineers and ecosystem builders, with enormous ownership, direct user impact, and the opportunity to build one of the most important scaling layers in web3.