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Senior Partnerships Manager - Agency, Japan

  • Asia
  • Sales and Account Management

About Shopify

Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. Since 2006, we’ve grown to over 10,000 employees and generated over $496 billion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. Every 28 seconds, an entrepreneur on Shopify makes their first sale.

This is life-defining work that directly impacts people’s lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option.

About you

Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone.

Before you apply, consider if you can:

  • Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone
  • Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth
  • Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter)
  • Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change
  • Bring critical thought and opinion
  • Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward
  • Work digital-first for your daily work

About the role

Shopify Plus has a unique opportunity to disrupt the enterprise commerce space and agencies today are already proving this to be possible.  As a Partner Manager, you will be critical to supporting our agency partners — they are an integral part of the Shopify Plus Partner Program. You will be responsible for managing and developing partner relationships throughout Japan.

This is a remote position available within Japan. Japanese language proficiency required.

Projects you’ll work on:

  • Creating and executing business plans to develop the region

  • Researching agencies and solutions providers in Japan for prospective partners

  • Being able to understand and communicate the competitive strengths of each assigned partner

  • Recruiting and educating prospective partners

  • Assisting with training and onboarding new partners and new employees of each partner

  • Managing a pipeline of partner sales opportunities and working alongside the Plus sales team in Japan

  • Creating a joint value proposition for each partner and identifying who the relevant audience is

  • Working with marketing to identify opportunities for campaigns, co-marketing, case studies and events that increase partner pipeline

  • Proposing potential business deals by discovering and exploring opportunities with existing partners

  • Speaking and attending events to evangelize Shopify Plus to prospective partners and merchants

  • Understanding the multiple merchant types in Japan and influencing our product direction to best serve partners and merchants in the region

Qualifications

Requirements for the role:

  • You excel at establishing and growing mutually beneficial business relationships

  • You’re curious and know how to research a business

  • You're keen to help people keep their promises and aren't afraid to enforce the rules

  • You have at least 4 years experience in enterprise ecommerce or partnerships

  • You have great business development skills

  • You have the ability to work under pressure

  • You understand the inner workings of a digital agency

  • You can work well as part of a team and as an individual contributor

  • You have excellent written and oral communication skills in Japanese and English

The shape of a Shopify career

Ben joined Shopify as a frontline Support Advisor with no background in programming or computer science. He’s now a Director of Engineering. Spanning 10 jobs on 7 teams in 9 years, Ben’s Shopify career path has twisted and turned as he’s worked relentlessly to pursue a career as an engineer and adapted to the pace of change—all fuelled by personal and professional hypergrowth.

Our mission as a company is to spread entrepreneurship and help individuals become their own bosses and take control over their lives. I truly believe this mission and value in extreme personal growth and development extends to what’s expected as a Shopifolk. Shopify doesn’t like to tell people what to do. Not only is your career in your own hands, a lot of your day-to-day is too, which can be jarring for many people. To thrive here, you need to be someone who’s willing to take big bets on yourself and figure things out on your own.

Ben Cox
Director, Support & CX Engineering

Ben’s growth trajectory

2014-2016

  • A support advisor for 2 years
  • Studied dev skills. Learnt about our API. Became first API support person. Found bugs to fix.
  • Eventually became a software dev

2017-2019

  • Helped launch first finance product for merchants
  • Became senior dev and launched new support contact centre
  • Led a team as a dev manager

2020-2022

  • Scaled a team from 4 to 60+ as a senior dev manager
  • Became Director for Support and CX Engineering

We hire people, not resumes. If you think you’re right for the role, apply now.

First things first

We want to ensure you’re the type of person who will thrive here so we can move you quickly through our hiring process. Before completing the job application, please check all the statements that apply to you below:

It looks like you might not be a great fit for Shopify at this time- while we encourge everyone to apply, we are looking for someone who can meet all these criteria.

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