Head of Business Development - Crypto

As Head of Business Development for Crypto at Alpaca, you'll lead commercial expansion in the tokenized equity space. You'll work directly on relationships and infrastructure connecting issuers, market makers, and exchanges to Alpaca's Instant Tokenization Network, helping build and scale the commercial backbone of a genuinely new market category. This role reports to the Director of Business Development and offers significant scope for ownership and growth as the network scales.

What you'll do

• Identify, develop, and manage relationships with issuers, liquidity providers, and market makers participating in the tokenized equity ecosystem
• Act as a trusted point of contact for prospective and existing partners, understanding their goals and matching them to Alpaca's tokenization infrastructure
• Support commercial negotiations and structure partnership terms in collaboration with Legal and Compliance
• Own the end-to-end onboarding process for new issuers and market makers joining the Instant Tokenization Network, ensuring a smooth, well-coordinated experience
• Work closely with Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering to translate partner requirements into onboarding workflows and technical integrations, and ensure a seamless handoff post go-live
• Track and report on pipeline, onboarding status, and network growth metrics to senior leadership
• Play a hands-on role in growing Alpaca's Instant Tokenization Network, helping define partnership models, liquidity structures, and go-to-market approach for on-chain equities
• Build and cultivate partnerships across the digital asset ecosystem, including wallets, custodians, exchanges, and crypto-native infrastructure, to expand Alpaca's footprint
• Identify and qualify prospects for Alpaca's Broker API, working closely with Sales to hand off opportunities that extend beyond the tokenization network
• Represent Alpaca at industry events and in partner conversations as a knowledgeable voice on tokenized equities and market structure
• Monitor the regulatory and competitive landscape for digital assets and tokenized securities, feeding insights back into strategy

What you bring

• 5+ years of experience in business development, partnerships, or institutional sales within financial services, fintech, capital markets, or crypto/digital assets
• Familiarity with market maker, liquidity provider, or issuer relationships, ideally within equities, ETFs, or digital asset markets
• Strong understanding of, or strong appetite to quickly learn, tokenization, blockchain-based settlement, and digital asset market structure
• Working knowledge of crypto and digital asset regulations such as licensing regimes, custody requirements, and securities classification issues, and how they shape partnership and go-to-market decisions
• Excellent relationship management and negotiation skills, with the ability to manage multiple partner relationships and onboarding workstreams simultaneously
• Comfort working cross-functionally with Sales, Customer Success, Product, Engineering, Legal, and Compliance teams in a fast-moving, remote-first environment
• Self-starter mentality with strong organizational skills and a bias toward action

Nice to have

• Prior experience at a broker-dealer, exchange, market maker, or crypto-native firm
• Existing network of relationships among issuers, market makers, or liquidity providers
• Experience working on tokenization, RWA (real-world asset), or on-chain market infrastructure projects
• Familiarity with broker API or brokerage-as-a-service business models

What we offer

• Competitive salary and stock options
• Health benefits
• One-time home office setup stipend of USD $500
• Monthly stipend of USD $150 per month via a Brex Card

About Alpaca

Alpaca is a US-headquartered global leader in agent-first brokerage infrastructure serving hundreds of financial institutions across 40 countries with institutional-grade APIs. The company manages over 10 million brokerage accounts and is backed by $400 million in funding from top-tier investors including Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, Y Combinator, and others. With 400+ globally distributed team members spanning the USA, Canada, Japan, Hungary, Nigeria, Brazil, and the UK, Alpaca is building infrastructure to open financial services to everyone on the planet.