Head of Business Development

Summary

Join Duolingo's growing Partnerships team as a Business Development Lead in APAC, based in Tokyo. You will build a partnerships pipeline across APAC markets, focusing initially on Japan and Korea. Develop business cases for strategic partnerships to drive brand awareness, monetization, and user growth. Leverage market insights and your network to build value-accretive partnerships. Collaborate with product, marketing, and engineering teams globally. Report to the Global Head of Business Development. This role requires significant international travel.

Requirements

• 7+ years of business development experience having successfully developed partnerships in the digital consumer tech (B2C) space
• Strong understanding of the APAC market having worked in Japan and/or other priority APAC markets
• Experience in conceiving, developing, and implementing partnerships throughout their full cycles, from deal sourcing, to building business cases, negotiating agreements, driving and tracking results
• Work experience in consulting or investment banking
• Culturally clued up and immersed in regional players, and able to use your network to launch impactful partnerships
• Ambitious spirit with a track record of achieving great results by building long-lasting external relationships, collaborating effectively with multiple internal teams to drive ideas to execution, and taking a test and scale approach
• Critical thinking and structured thought process, with skills to build and communicate compelling, data-driven narratives
• Ability to travel internationally frequently, specifically to Pittsburgh (HQ) and New York

Responsibilities

• Leverage market insights and understanding of the partnership landscape to develop and communicate an effective strategy for partnerships in APAC (with particular focus on Japan first)
• Build a pipeline of strategic partners in APAC across verticals (app stores, telcos, media and entertainment, banks, payment providers, etc.)
• Grow our portfolio by sourcing new opportunities with measurable impact to key business metrics in your region
• Build compelling and quantifiable business cases for strategic bets to pursue in the region
• Negotiate and implement partnerships across monetization, brand and user growth
• Work closely with Product/Engineering to influence product integrations vital to get strategic partnerships off the ground
• Collaborate with global and local Marketing teams to amplify partnership launches through buzz-worthy activations

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with mobile apps and subscription services a strong plus
• Lived and worked in multiple APAC markets
• MBA from reputable university
• Proficiency in a 3rd language
• Excitement for our mission to make high-quality language learning accessible to everyone