VP of Integrations

As the VP of Integrations for Acala, you will have the opportunity to be the first leader in our technical integrations and business development operation, driving adoption of Acala and Karura's DeFi products. You will be a key player alongside Acala’s leadership team, contributing to broader strategic planning discussions and helping steer the direction of Acala’s network and suite of applications. This person will report to the CEO and co-founders.

We are looking for a technically minded individual with a very strong understanding of the blockchain space across multiple ecosystems including Ethereum and Polkadot. You should have extensive business development and relationship management experience, along with a passion for decentralization and 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.

Responsibilities

• Integrations & Business Development: Lead the technical integrations work for Acala, including existing integration work and generating new potential integrations for Acala’s products. You should be able to coordinate and organize the integrations pipeline, and work closely with the co-founders to loop them in when needed. You will lead integrations from initial relationship to coding due diligence to integration.
• Product: Identify new product strategies and features that you find during your integrations and business development work. Become a critical part of the product team to shape Acala’s future.
• Strategy: You should lead the integrations strategy for Acala, helping to shape the direction of the platform before and after launch.
• Relationship Building: Lead the relationship building efforts for Acala with the broader ecosystem to educate people on Acala’s story, Acala’s novel approach to DeFi in the Polkadot ecosystem, and work to find integration opportunities with projects within and outside of the Polkadot ecosystem.
• Leadership: Build relationships with other projects and organizations in the industry, being an influential voice for Acala. Also serve as a passionate and inspirational leader within Acala and your team.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience
• 7-10+ years of product-focused business development experience
• Expert-level understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrency industry
• Deep knowledge of the decentralized finance (DeFi) space
• Strong network in the crypto industry, including the Polkadot and Ethereum ecosystems
• Self-starter and quick learner that requires very little oversight
• Must be a pleasure to work with, flexible, and easy-going
• Thrives in fast-paced environments and can adapt quickly to shifting priorities
• You have strong personal organization and project management abilities
• Outstanding interpersonal skills and the ability to effectively communicate, build rapport and relate to others in both written and verbal forms
• Native or Fluent English

Preferred Qualifications

• Technical and/or product management experience on a blockchain project
• Experience with Substrate and/or Solidity
• Experience in a fast-paced startup in blockchain, fintech, or banking.
• Prior experience in programming.

Benefits

• Join one of the most significant and anticipated upcoming launches in the blockchain industry
• Join an extremely high-performing team
• Competitive compensation and employee benefits
• Collaborative, transparent and empowering work culture
• Flexible work time and generous paid vacations
• Meaningful work in creating better technologies for a more fair future
• Opportunity to work in a multinational, high-performance team with diverse backgrounds. Our team not only has the most influential Substrate contributor and course lecturer, but also iTunes awarded app developers, part-time artists, competitive CS players, a snowboard coach, and a marathon runner.

About Acala

The mission of Acala is to support and nurture the financial applications of the true decentralized web, Web 3.0, for a more open and fair future. The drivers of this mission are delivering financial stability, liquidity and accessibility for all. Our core project is Acala, the decentralized finance (DeFi) hub of Polkadot. We are also building Karura, the DeFi hub of Kusama.
While Polkadot provides a scalable trust layer, Acala has been building a DeFi-optimized layer-1 blockchain with a suite of financial applications including a multi-collateralized stablecoin, trustless staking derivatives and a unified decentralized exchange to power innovation in the open finance space.

Our Values

As a close knit team of engineers working remotely from Auckland (New Zealand), Tirana (Albania), and Shanghai (China), we are building Acala based on a core set of values we believe are in line with the tenets of Web 3.0:

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

Our team came together because of a deep desire to build the foundations for a new, inclusive financial system, in direct contrast to the clear shortcomings and challenges of the current system and institutions across geographies. Our team includes some of the leading blockchain innovators, Substrate and Rust developers, full-stack dApp developers and economists.

What We Have Achieved

Acala was founded in late 2019. We are an early Web3 Foundation Grant recipient and an ecosystem and education partner of W3F and Polkadot. We have delivered 3 successful live testnets, acquiring 14,000 new accounts and 140,000 transactions within 3 weeks. Acala will be amongst the first to launch on both Kusama and Polkadot in the coming months. We have secured support from top-notch supporters like Pantera and Polychain, and are preparing the Acala parachain launch where we will lead the way for a new type of fair and ethical network bootstrapping and launch. It's a great opportunity to join a fast-growing start-up at an early stage.