Business Development Lead

Job description

Zama is hiring a Sales, Growth & Strategy Lead for TokenOps, its newly acquired token operations platform (The Block, Business Insider). TokenOps will continue to operate independently, with the same CEO and team, and a sharper mission: bringing Fully Homomorphic Encryption to vesting, distributions, and treasury flows on public blockchains.

The Role: You’ll be Team Member #7 at TokenOps and will report directly to the CEO (Fabio). Around 80% of your time will focus on growth (sales, BD, marketing, acquisition). The remaining 20% will be dedicated to strategy and special projects, including new TokenOps/Zama product and commercial bets, and engaging key stakeholders and leadership within and outside Zama.

Growth, Sales & BD (80%)

• Own the pipeline end-to-end: outbound, inbound, qualification, onboarding, activation, and expansion. You’ll take over from the previous BD lead and the CEO.
• Evangelize the product and help close deals alongside the CEO.
• Build strategic partnerships and co-marketing collaborations that expand TokenOps’ reach, including across the broader Zama ecosystem.
• Hit revenue and pipeline targets and report on commercial metrics. Use data (and your gut) to tighten the funnel.
• Run acquisition across both paid and organic channels. You should be comfortable running a Google, LinkedIn, or X ad campaign one day, and writing a blog post that ranks the next. We don’t want a pure brand person, and we don’t want a pure performance person.
• Own the content engine and co-marketing: blog posts, social, newsletter, thought leadership, joint campaigns, guest posts, podcast swaps, and conference partnerships.
• Drive SEO and GEO from zero. Traditional search engines and the new generation of answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) both matter. This includes keyword research, on-page work, link-building, content briefs, structured data, and prompt-friendly content that surfaces in AI answers.
• Run our social presence (X, LinkedIn) and community touchpoints.
• All of the above can be achieved solo (for initial experiments) or by progressively leading a team and/or freelancers/agencies (for scale).

Strategy & Chief of Staff (20%)

• Partner with the CEO on strategic projects: market sizing, competitive analysis, pricing, GTM bets, and new product bets.
• Prepare materials for Zama’s CEO and Board: quarterly updates, strategic reviews, and integration touchpoints. You’ll help translate what we’re doing on the ground into the language the parent company needs.
• Prepare the CEO for partner meetings, conference talks, and ecosystem calls. Sometimes you’ll own the deck end-to-end.
• Firefight. Whatever needs doing this week, you do it: recruiting pipeline, vendor selection, ops—you name it.
• Bridge between commercial and product/engineering. Translate market signals into roadmap input.

Preferred experience

• At least 2–5 years’ experience across some combination of growth, BD, or sales at a startup, management consulting, or founder/operator roles. Pattern-matching ability matters more than the exact path.
• If you’re more junior / less experienced than the above, we still encourage you to apply if you have a PSD degree (Memo from Alan C. Greenberg, 1981). Top-class formal education/experience is a plus, but what we really care about is grit.
• Hands-on with both paid and organic acquisition. You’ve run ad campaigns and written content that pulled traffic. Or you’ve done one and are eager to own the other.
• A “not my job” attitude won’t fly here. Comfortable in a small, fast-moving startup without hierarchy. Self-directed, resourceful, able to operate with uncertainty.
• Strong communication, structuring, and presentation skills. You can build a deck, write a memo, and run a meeting that ends with decisions.
• AI-first ways of working. You build your own workflows around Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, n8n, or whatever else gets the job done. You expect to be heavily augmented by AI, not outsourcing your judgment to it.
• Prior work experience in Web3 and an existing personal network. Bonus for any exposure to FHE, ZK, MPC, or confidential computing, or willingness to go deep on it.
• Excellent, native-like spoken and written English. Other languages are a plus, especially Asian ones.