Ecosystem Accelerator Lead

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; Multi-collateralized Stablecoin; Trustless Staking Derivatives, and Unified Decentralized Exchange. These primitives will be used by us and other teams to power open DeFi innovations, and burn away all need for the parasitic 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. We’re still preparing Acala’s parachain launch, so there’s no better time to join our mission and be a part of the future that we’re building. Because whoever you are, we’re building it for you. 🚀

About the role

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

Since the inception of the Acala project our founding team have been inspired by a future vision of blockchain built upon values of inclusion, empowerment & guidance. To that end we have launched a $100m Ecosystem Accelerator Program (EAP) to find, nurture and advise the next generation of DeFi projects that are currently under development, and in need of support.

Anyone can build and deploy on Acala and find adequate guidance through our self-service support model of technical documentation and open source code. But the level of support that our EAP will provide also covers; Technical mentorship; Architectural assistance; Engineering support; Growth & Marketing aid; Funding advice; Head-hunting help and anything else that the Acala Team can offer.

As EA Lead you will source and evaluate a pipeline of incubator projects and help us to determine the most promising. To succeed you’ll need two things; Intimate knowledge of blockchain, including where and how to find emerging crypto projects; A background in partnership building, including financial and legal due diligence. You’ll be reviewing DeFi projects’ documentation on a daily basis, and then driving Acala’s engagement with them.

Competitive Salary | Full Time | Contract | Remote anywhere

What you’ll do:

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

What it takes

• 5 years experience in similar Accelerator or Partnership programs, preferably in Fintech
• A Technical background; We don’t need you to code, but you’ll be evaluating Engineers
• Intimate blockchain knowledge; Minimum 1 year in the commercial Crypto/DeFi space
• Presidential communication skills; Verbal, written, listening, tweeting, etc

Scope

We currently evaluate 3-5 projects per month, although most are unsuitable. But following the launch of our EVM on Polkadot (Q2'22) we expect an order of magnitude increase. Our ideal candidate will have run a partnership program of this scale before, possibly for an Academic Institute and will be able to discuss the necessary funnel-building and filtering techniques at interview stages.

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…