Bounty Application: A #trading Internship
This application is to fund an engineering internship, where the intern should be selected by established community members in the Rocket Pool Discord server and approved for hire via snapshot vote.
Bounty
It is no secret at the Rocket Pool core team could use more engineering capacity. The Rocket Pool community, for that matter, makes original contributions on an ongoing basis and could use engineering help as well.
Where the core team is resource constrained, the pDAO could feasibly hire a full-time engineering intern for a salary on the order of $20k USD/450 RPL for 3 months through the GMC.
Benefits
If the bounty is successfully completed, how does this help people looking to stake ETH for rETH / rETH holders / people looking to run a Rocket Pool node for the first time / people already running a Rocket Pool node / the Rocket Pool community / RPL holders?
All Rocket Pool stakeholders stand to benefit from increased engineering capacity. For this proposal, the specific tasks and projects that an intern would deliver on are deliberately unspecified, so that the community can select the best candidate and collaborate with them in an area that takes advantage of their strengths and maximizes the overall value of their work.
General benefits of hiring an intern:
- An intern with a proven track record of delivering for Rocket Pool could be a great candidate for the team to have as a full-time employee.
- Having participated in a significant amount of engineering hiring, internship applicants tend to have better educational pedigrees than regular employees because internships are more competitive for candidates than full-time roles.
- Interns are, by definition, young and in learning mode, and a talented intern should be highly adaptable to working in a non-traditional context / for a DAO.
- An interns could present their project(s) at Ethereum conferences, which is great marketing for Rocket Pool and a great example for other projects in the space.
- There may be external funding that could help offset the cost of hiring an intern, resulting in a compelling ROI for the protocol.
What other non-RPL protocols, DAOs, projects, or individuals, would stand to benefit from the bounty being successfully completed?
An internship with Rocket Pool would be a fantastic opportunity for a student interested in pursuing a non-traditional career in Ethereum/web3. The Rocket Pool community is welcoming, highly engaged, well-connected, and a proponent of Ethereum values.
Will the results of the completed bounty be open source?
Everything must be open source to the fullest possible extent, with the possible exception of contributions to non-open source repositories privately managed by the Rocket Pool core team.
Work and Verification
What steps would be entailed in completing the bounty? Do successful examples of such work exist elsewhere?
Where volunteers are named below, I will act as the only volunteer in the worst case.
- The recruitment and hiring process will be a volunteering effort by Rocket Pool community members, including the posting a job description, vetting candidates, and giving standard technical interviews.
- A channel or thread in the Rocket Pool Discord server will be created to facilitate collaboration between the community and intern. Volunteer mentors will be identified to provide support.
- The intern will summarize the projects or tasks that they propose to do in the DAO forum and the Discord server, solicit community feedback, and proceed on the basis of informal positive signal from the Rocket Pool community.
- The intern will be expected to provide regular updates to the community and for any code they write to be visible in open source repositories on a daily basis.
- At the conclusion of the internship, the intern will be asked to present their work to the community via livestream.
How long is the proposed bounty available for? Is it awarded to the first team to successfully claim it, or is it in some way divided among all such successful claims in the proposed availability period?
This bounty will be awarded to the first internship candidate that is approved via snapshot vote, according to a typical payment schedule (weekly or bi-weekly distributions).
If, at any point, the community decides that the intern is not fulfilling their duties, they can be removed from their position via snapshot vote.
Who will test any products submitted for claiming the bounty?
Rocket Pool community members and mentors who follow the intern’s regular updates.
What is the acceptance criteria for awarding of the bounty?
As mentioned, the intern must be approved by snapshot vote, and prorated payment can be interrupted at anytime by a follow-up snapshot vote to terminate the internship.
Payment
How much RPL is the applicant requesting for successful completion of the bounty?
The equivalent of $20,000 USD. This is based on industry standards for quality software engineering internships, which tend to pay $6-8k/mo. If cost is a significant concern, a smaller amount ($10-15k) may be feasible but it may be more difficult to find talented candidates.
Conflict of Interest
Does the person or persons proposing the bounty have any conflicts of interest to disclose? (Please disclose here if you are a member of the GMC or if any member of the GMC would benefit directly financially from the successful completion of the bounty).
No conflicts
Will the applicant, or any protocol or project in which the applicant has a vested interest (other than Rocket Pool), benefit financially if the bounty is successfully completed?
The intern’s contributions must directly benefit the Rocket Pool protocol and its stakeholders. For example, contributing to beaconcha.in would not satisfy the criteria of this bounty.