Nethermind

Regional Business Development & Operations Lead - Tokyo, Japan

Nethermind  •  Japan (Onsite)  •  21 hours ago
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Job Description

About Complete Robot

We are an early-stage, venture-backed company currently operating out of San Francisco, building AI-enabled systems for automated physical environments.

The company works at the intersection of AI agents, connected devices, user experience, machine data, and real-world commercial operations. Complete Robot Inc. was founded by Tomasz Stańczak, founder of Nethermind and former Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation.

To learn more about the company, vision, and the technology we're building, visit the Complete Robot website.

About the role:

We are looking for a senior business development and operations lead based in Spain, ideally with strong access to the vending, unattended retail, payments, convenience retail, or retail automation ecosystem.

This is a strategic commercial and operating role, not a standard sales role The person will help open commercial conversations, identify pilot opportunities, support early deployments, and build the foundation for future regional operations.

The right candidate should be comfortable speaking with machine operators, retail partners, payment providers, distributors, location owners, and technical stakeholders.

For candidates who can start immediately, there may be an opportunity to join the founding team in San Francisco for an intensive onboarding and company-building period at a prestigious accelerator. This may include staying with the team in the accelerator environment while working closely on early customer, product, and market-development work, subject to timing, availability, travel, immigration, and company approval.

About the role:

We are looking for a senior business development and operations lead with direct Japanese market experience in vending, convenience stores, payments, retail automation, unattended retail, kiosks, robotics, or adjacent machine-based commerce. This is an early, high-ownership role for someone who can help build a local market presence from the ground up.

You will help the company understand and enter the Japanese market by building relationships, identifying pilot opportunities, supporting local partner conversations, and translating market requirements into practical next steps.

This is a strategic commercial and operating role, not a generic sales role. The right candidate must understand how business relationships are built in Japan, how to work with large companies, and how to make a new technology concept credible to commercial and technical stakeholders.

For candidates who can start immediately, there may be an opportunity to join the founding team in San Francisco for an intensive onboarding and company-building period at a prestigious accelerator. This may include staying with the team in the accelerator environment while working closely on early customer, product, and market-development work, subject to timing, availability, travel, immigration, and company approval.

This is an early, high-ownership role for someone who can help build a local market presence from the ground up.

Responsibilities:

  • Own early business development for Japan.

  • Map relevant customer, partner, and operator opportunities in vending, convenience retail, payments, automation, and self-service commerce.

  • Build relationships with operators, retailers, technology partners, payment providers, distributors, automation companies, and strategic commercial partners.

  • Identify pilot opportunities in vending, convenience-style automation, and related unattended retail environments.

  • Work directly with the founder on local market development, partner strategy, positioning, and customer feedback.

  • Adapt the company's product narrative for Japanese customers, partners, and technical stakeholders.

  • Lead local meetings, demos, partner follow-up, and commercial conversations in Japanese.

  • Translate customer and partner feedback into product, integration, and deployment requirements.

  • Support planning for pilots, integrations, field testing, support expectations, and local operations.

  • Help define what the company needs in order to operate credibly in Japan.

  • Build the foundation for a future Japan team across sales, operations, partnerships, field deployment, and customer success.

Requirements:

Direct experience in at least one of the following is required:

  • Japanese vending machine industry

  • Japanese convenience store industry

  • Convenience store automation

  • Payments, cashless payments, merchant acquiring, or POS in Japan

  • Retail automation

  • Unattended retail

  • Self-service kiosks

  • Automated food, beverage, or retail machines

  • Robotics or machine automation for commercial environments

  • Consumer hardware or industrial hardware partnerships in Japan

  • Japanese fluency required.

  • Professional English required.

  • Strong understanding of Japanese business culture, enterprise sales cycles, partner management, and relationship-building.

  • Ability to communicate credibly with Japanese commercial partners, payment companies, technical teams, and executives.

  • Ability to understand both commercial and technical discussions around machines, payments, service, inventory, operations, and customer experience.

  • Willingness to travel frequently within Japan and occasionally internationally.

  • Comfortable operating in an early-stage startup with high autonomy and limited structure.

  • Strong follow-through, attention to detail, and ability to turn meetings into structured next steps.

Preferred experience:

  • Experience working with Japanese vending companies, convenience store groups, payment companies, POS companies, retail automation providers, or related operators.

  • Experience with cashless payments, loyalty, mobile wallets, POS systems, vending telemetry, or self-service retail infrastructure.

  • Experience launching pilots or new technology partnerships with large Japanese companies.

  • Experience with robotics, IoT, machine automation, smart retail, or industrial technology.

  • Experience bridging Japanese companies with US or European startups.

  • Experience building a local country operation or strategic partnership function from scratch.

Success outcomes:

  • You build a practical understanding of the Japanese market and priority commercial opportunities.

  • You identify high-priority partners, customers, and pilot opportunities.

  • You secure quality meetings with relevant Japanese decision-makers.

  • You help the company understand the local requirements for entering the market.

  • You help move at least one serious opportunity toward a pilot, collaboration, or commercial next step.

  • Over time, you help establish Japan as a credible and important market for the company.

Why Join:

This is an opportunity to join early and help build a local market for a technology company operating in automated retail and machine-based commerce.

The right person can grow from first local hire into a broader leadership role as the company expands.

Immediate starters may also have the opportunity to join the team in San Francisco during an early accelerator period, staying and building together with the founding team while helping shape the company's first commercial foundation.

Nethermind

About Nethermind

Nethermind has a world class team of builders and researchers with expertise in Ethereum, protocol engineering, layer 2 scaling, decentralized finance, smart contracts development and enterprise blockchain. We provide technology, R&D and consulting services for blockchain and DeFi businesses.

The Nethermind team actively contributes to Ethereum core development and supports many Ethereum projects to help further develop the ecosystem. Working with amazing partners such as StarkWare, POA, EWF, Baseline, Provide and many more, Nethermind is building the future of blockchain and DeFi.

Build with Nethermind.

Github: https://github.com/NethermindEth

Contact us on: hello@nethermind.io

For technical assistance, join us on our Discord: https://discord.gg/PaCMRFdvWT

Industry
IT & Software
Company Size
201-500 employees
Headquarters
London, GB
Year Founded
2017
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