Technical Research Analyst
We’re looking for a truth-seeking analyst — someone who thrives on deep research, is intellectually rigorous, and curious about Africa’s startup landscape in all its messy, beautiful complexity. You spot what others ignore. You ask questions most don’t.
The role
What you will do:
Conduct research for everything happening onchain in Africa.
Produce dashboards & datasets for African crypto products which set the standard for “open science” on open networks.
Find and use the best primary resources to understand nuanced patterns in how magic internet money moves, or who is using it for what applications at different points in time
Leverage your research to produce prototypes (for market making with local stablecoins, or managing loan pools for yield-bearing real world assets, etc.) that our portfolio companies can use to remain leaders in their respective industries.
Assist with technical due diligence on certain projects which require novel research.
Your work will shape:
The core theses we have when investing, how much weight we give them, and consequently our portfolio structure
Our internal memos, market analyses, and decision frameworks
The support and insight we are able to provide portfolio companies and, consequently, the shape of the African market in the next decade. Your research will be pivotal to ensuring that onchain products remain open, credibly neutral, censorship-resistant, and efficient.
And yes, we want you to:
Question our assumptions
Push back when something doesn’t make sense
Roll your sleeves up and create a high performance team with us
What we value most
Experience working with onchain data using Dune or other tools
Radical attention to detail
Real world intuition - you’re often asking if what you see actually makes sense
Ability to go deeper on a specific project than anyone else you know - you can focus exclusively on one rabbit hole for days at a time and emerge out the other side with surprisingly meaningful insights
A love of verifying your work, rather than just recycling data and opinions
Open, honest, and clear communication
Intellectual humility and truth seeking
Value you get
You will constantly be pushed and challenged to grow
Deep exposure into the startup world, investment decisions, and our vast global network
Mentorship with room for career growth
Details
Remote, preferably based somewhere on the continent
Full time
Travel from time to time
Competitive compensation with upside based on performance
Interested?
Instead of a cover letter, we want you to complete 1 of the below tasks to help us evaluate your thinking and email us your answer to join@lavavc.io with the subject line ‘research’. Also include your Github link.
What’s missing from this Dune dashboard? How can it be improved? Fork it, write better queries, include more networks and coins, produce more insightful visualizations: all in the pursuit of gleaning deeper insights into the emerging landscape of local currency stablecoins in Africa.
Use this dashboard to provide an opinion on this proposal. You can fork the dashboard, produce more up-to-date and relevant results, and then relate your work to Mento’s latest proposal to restructure their reserve. How much has really come into the reserve over the last years? How should they think about the weight of different assets? Can you gather any other onchain data about the proposed yield-bearing stablecoins that could help craft an informed opinion on the proposal?
Walk us through your favourite spell, along with at least 3 demonstrations of its use that you find to be novel, surprising, and/or insightful. Bonus points if those use cases reveal interesting facts about onchain usage in emerging markets, and particularly in Africa.
If your brain is diving into the weeds of a task (or all) then there could be a fit. If you are wondering why we’re asking for a task upfront, then this might not be for you.
If you got this far, you’ll notice we never asked for your CV. That’s on purpose. Do the task above first.