Disclaimer: Following are my personal views and I don't represent the whole dev team or other individual devs in any way.
It sounds like a mostly good idea. However I ran valgrind a few days ago and found only 8MB of leaks. Some of it are in libraries and for the rest I'll have fixes up soon. Anyway, it's not much.
For the rest, I'm pretty sure there is progress to be made and memory to be saved in the codebase, but I'm also pretty sure it won't be a miracle. PIVX is taking up memory mostly because its features like zPIV require it (even if it's disabled, it's still in the code, which might change soon or not but won't depend on an audit)
Anyway that's one of the things on my todo list. I don't mind seeing it done by someone else.
However I'm not sure paying months of work upfront without a detailed plan is the best way to go. And I don't see a detailed plan nor any track record here: Github is linked but empty. No way to know if the guy is good or not.
I'd like to at the very least see some code or recommandations. If not, the best way to go is to submit one or two small PR to show one's worth and then request money for more work. It's open source after all.