Business Development, APAC
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Overview
Join Stellar Development Foundation as a Business Development professional to drive growth in the APAC region, focusing on partnerships and institutional relationships in the blockchain and fintech sectors. Interested in working on cutting-edge blockchain technology and creating equitable access to the global financial system? Since 2014, the mission-driven team at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) has helped fuel the tremendous growth of the Stellar blockchain network, an open-source platform that operates at high-scale today. Developers and companies around the world build on it, and the SDF team is expanding to support the rapidly growing and changing Stellar ecosystem. APAC is not a future opportunity for Stellar — it is an active one. We have live integrations with fintech, payments, and digital asset companies across the APAC region, a growing cohort of builders developing on Stellar rails, and relationships with leading financial institutions and ecosystem partners across the region.
In this role, you will
- •Own SDF's APAC business development effort — defining priorities, allocating effort across five hub markets (Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Japan, Australia), and adapting the playbook by market needs and regulatory expectations.
- •Lead in-market execution across all markets, including structured annual visits to each hub that deliver across a full engagement program: conference presence, ecosystem meetups, strategic institutional meetings, owned roundtables and thought leadership opportunities, and policy and regulatory introductions.
- •Work hand-in-hand with SDF's APAC Market Development Director to jointly define how SDF shows up across the region — aligning business development priorities with broader market development strategy, co-owning key stakeholder relationships where useful, and ensuring in-market execution and regional strategy move in lockstep rather than in parallel.
- •Build and close high-value partnerships with fintech companies, payment platforms, wallets, exchanges, and developer teams building on Stellar, driving active pipeline companies through to live Stellar integration and sustained network volume.
- •Operate effectively as a remote, in-market leader while working in close, seamless coordination with SDF's centralized teams — marketing, legal, integrations, and product, among others — to keep deals moving, resolve blockers quickly, and ensure a smooth handoff from signed partnership through to live, fully supported integration.
- •Develop and manage SDF's institutional relationships across the region — including tier-1 banks (DBS, OCBC, HSBC Asia, MUFG, Commonwealth Bank of Australia), licensed digital asset platforms, and payment majors — identifying and progressing partnership opportunities that drive volume at infrastructure scale.
- •Serve as an internal champion and voice of the APAC market within SDF — translating on-the-ground intelligence into strategic recommendations, influencing product priorities, and ensuring the broader organisation understands the region's regulatory nuances, opportunities, and constraints.
- •Build and maintain rigorous pipeline discipline across HubSpot and Airtable, ensuring integration status, relationship health, and strategic context are accurately captured and accessible to the broader team.
- •Represent SDF at flagship regional conferences and events (e.g., Token2049, Money20/20 Asia), and own the design and execution of SDF's owned events in the region, including builder roundtables and ecosystem meetups in each hub city.
- •Partner with the marketing team to drive ongoing content and communications that build SDF's presence and narrative across APAC markets — including press releases, video, blog posts, and social content drawn from market activity, partnerships, and ecosystem engagement.
You have
- •Bachelor's Degree (required), Master's Degree or MBA (preferred).
- •7+ years of business development, partnerships, or ecosystem experience, with substantial time spent working at senior levels in or closely with APAC markets.
- •Deep, senior-level relationships across the APAC fintech, payments, blockchain, and institutional landscape — including builders, accelerators, banks, exchanges, and regulatory stakeholders.
- •Experience in blockchain, digital assets, stablecoins, or tokenization.
- •Understanding of cross-border payments, Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), and financial inclusion.
- •Demonstrated experience leading complex, multi-stakeholder partnership negotiations and closing deals that require internal alignment as well as external relationship management.
- •Experience navigating regulatory environments in APAC markets (e.g., MAS in Singapore, SFC/HKMA in Hong Kong, FSA in Japan, etc).
- •Exceptional communication skills across diverse audiences — you can distill a complex technical value proposition into a compelling narrative.
- •Fluency in English; proficiency in Mandarin or Japanese is a plus.
- •Based in APAC, with the ability and willingness to travel extensively across the region and occasionally internationally.