Director, Ecosystem Development

About Acala

Acala’s mission is to build and nurture the autonomous financial infrastructure of the decentralized web. Delivering on this mission will bring more financial accessibility, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone on the planet through a new, open financial system.

Our core project is the Acala Network itself, which we expect to become the de facto DeFi parachain and stablecoin of the Polkadot ecosystem. Polkadot provides the underlying trust primitives to our parachain, upon which we’ve built our suite of financial primitives including; decentralized, multi-collateral stablecoin; trustless staking derivatives, and Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and remove the need for the intermediaries that inhabit almost every conventional trust-based financial system.

We have secured our support from eminent backers like Polychain, Coinbase Venture, Pantera and many more. Acala has just began its launch process on December 18, 2021, so there’s no better time to join our mission and be a part of the future that we’re building.

About the role

As the Director of Ecosystem Development for Acala, you will have the opportunity to be a leader in our Ecosystem Development and Growth team, driving development on Acala’s platform, adoption of Acala’s decentralized stablecoin (aUSD), and growth in metrics such as applications built on Acala, Total Value Locked (TVL), and transactions. You will also have the opportunity to contribute to broader strategic planning for Acala to help steer the direction of the platform.

We are looking for a Business Development leader with strong experience in an Enterprise or Startup Sales environment with unmatched work ethic, organization, project management, relationship building, and a relentless drive for results. You should have a passion for decentralization, Web 3.0, rebuilding the world’s financial infrastructure, and you should be fun and easy to work with. Your scope will be quite broad and you will have the opportunity to continue growing in responsibility over time.

This is a commercially engaged role, working intimately with our founders and eventually our VC partners.

Competitive Salary | Full Time | Contract | Remote anywhere

What you’ll do:

• Leadership: Run our Development Program, from Day 1 initial outreach to full-on engagement
• Business Development: Redefine our sourcing strategies to build a pipeline of DeFi projects
• Strategy: Set & Evaluate KPIs to determine who we engage, and who we don’t
• Operations: Help us to engage these projects, and build strong relationships
• Partnerships: Act as liaison between incubator projects and our VC partners as required

What it takes

• 5 years as Sales & Business Development Director in commercial software
• Experience organising Strategy & Partner programs, preferably in Fintech
• Technical knowledge; We don’t need you to code, but you’ll be involved in Engineering conversations
• Intimate blockchain knowledge; Minimum 1 year in the commercial Crypto/DeFi space
• Presidential communication skills; Verbal, written, listening, presentations, texting, tweeting, etc.

NB: For more information on this position, our employment conditions, or anything related to working for Acala, get in touch with our Talent Manager: [email protected].

Our Team

With approximately 40 full-time team members working across 8 different countries, our team is truly decentralised. We’re some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate & Rust engineers, full-stack dApp developers, & Economist Analysts. But we’re just people like you, working from our shared desire for a fairer and more inclusive financial system, in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings of the current institutions that run our world.

Our Values

The community we’re building is shaped by our values and fuelled by the needs of all humans:

• Inclusion, Care, Trust, and Respect
• Empowerment
• Guidance and Support
• Friendship, Community, Real Relationships

We’re building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of web3:

• True decentralisation
• Less Trust, More Truth
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Empowering individuals with more autonomy

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in 2019 as an early Web3 Foundation grant recipient, and is an ecosystem and education partner of both the W3F and Polkadot. Throughout 2021 we have proven ourselves to be the DeFi hub(s) of the Polkadot Ecosystem & Community by securing the first crowdloan-funded parachain slots on both the Polkadot & Kusama blockchain networks. But even at this, our true work has only just begun…