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 methodical research for everything happening onchain in Africa

    • Pair this with wider research from traditional sources (IMF, World Bank, BIS etc) to create coherent insights into how modern African markets are working, where they are lacking, and what is truly unique about them

  • Produce detailed analyses (dashboards & papers) for African markets that are still accessible, and which set the standard for “open science” on open networks

  • Find and use the best primary resources to understand nuanced patterns in how 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

  • Deep curiosity with hunger to learn and grow

  • 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 with code, rather than just collecting 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

  • “Analyst” means brainpower, not ‘the most junior person in the team’ - you influence with your work

  • 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.

1. Write up the “Methodology” part of a research document dedicated to investigating how liquidity works in Africa. In particular, we’re keen to answer these two questions in as much detail as we can:

  • Where can and do African payment orchestration companies source liquidity?

  • How efficiently is this liquidity used?

Bonus points if you can actually begin to answer these.

2. A portfolio company has asked us to help research how to make markets for ZAR onchain. They are aware of LVR, and are also curious about how to ensure that they don’t end up subsidizing imbalanced trade flows on an AMM if they create a ZAR <> USD pair. Specify how you would approach this request.

  • What are the best sources to share with them regarding profitable onchain market making?

  • Where is the best open source code which they could learn from and fork?

  • What are the open problems no-one has solved yet, and how might they approach those in the specific context of a high yield-bearing, reserve-backed stablecoin in an economy with higher interest rates compared to the USD?

3. We want to understand onchain credit markets. Produce the initial research overview for our first team call.

  • What is the history of experiments in this domain?

  • What is the state of the art for onchain credit? 

  • Who is doing the highest volumes, how are rates discovered, what is the risk profile of different players?

  • Which designs and experiments are most relevant to African markets and why? Bonus points if you differentiate between very different African markets.

  • What is no-one talking about or trying that would potentially be interesting 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.

View Other Roles

View Other Roles