Founding Growth & Deployment Lead, Japan

About the role

* Open to hiring remote across the US and London - we also have offices in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, and London Japan has been one of Runway's fastest-growing markets, even without a major commercial presence - it's our third-largest market among both enterprise and self-serve customers, and the fastest-growing self-serve market in Asia. In addition to millions of individual users, we've seen 300% growth in enterprise customers in the past 12 months, and Japan has driven a third of our sales volume in Asia overall. As a result, we are looking for a Founding Growth & Deployment Lead to own Runway's most strategic enterprise relationships in Japan - end to end. You will guide deals from first conversation through close, then ensure those partners thrive and expand on our platform after launch. This role requires full professional bilingual fluency in Japanese and English, deep familiarity with Japanese enterprise culture, and the commercial chops to own a book of business and close complex deals. Quarterly travel to Japan is expected.

Responsibilities

• Own the full commercial lifecycle for Japan book of business - from sourcing and qualifying opportunities to negotiating and closing enterprise deals, through to renewal, upsell, and long-term expansion
• Travel to Japan at least once per quarter for in-person relationship building, deal advancement, and partner support
• Represent Runway in Japan's creative and enterprise ecosystem - at events, industry forums, and partner summits
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Creative, Sales, and Leadership to translate Japan-specific market signals into roadmap input and go-to-market strategy - you are the voice of the Japanese market internally
• Go deep inside partner organizations to understand their creative and operational workflows, then design and propose targeted Runway solutions
• Identify and pursue new categories of opportunity within Japan - new verticals, new use cases, new partner types - and prototype quickly to validate before scaling
• Be hands-on in quickly onboarding new partners to our platform and/or API while also supporting their long-term expansion and technical understanding of how to leverage Runway
• Analyze, track, and report on the performance of existing partnerships leveraging BI tools and data

Requirements

• 7+ years of overall experience in customer-facing roles, engaging C-level audiences with complex global organizations ideally within tech, finance, or consulting
• Full professional bilingual fluency in Japanese and English
• Deep familiarity with Japanese enterprise culture, procurement, and relationship dynamics; able to travel to Japan at least quarterly
• Experience owning or contributing to P&L, commercial forecasting, and pipeline management
• Proven track record leading complex Generative AI or ML implementations with measurable business outcomes
• Highly resourceful, autonomous, and action-oriented - thrives in ambiguity, creates structure, and manages competing priorities without losing sight of what matters
• Exceptional executive communication and presentation skills
• Nice to have but not required: existing relationships in Japan's media, entertainment, advertising, or enterprise tech sectors
• SF-based preferred
• Runway strives to recruit and retain exceptional talent from diverse backgrounds while ensuring pay equity for our team. Our salary ranges are based on competitive market rates for our size, stage and industry, and salary is just one part of the overall compensation package we provide.

Benefits

Additional Information

We are building AI to simulate the world through merging art and science. We believe that world models are at the frontier of progress in artificial intelligence. Language models alone won't solve the world's hardest problems - robotics, disease, scientific discovery. Real progress requires models that experience the world and learn from their mistakes, the same way that humans do. And this kind of trial and error can be massively accelerated when done in simulation, rather than in the real world. World models offer the most clear path to general-purpose simulation, changing how stories are told, how scientific progress is made and how the next frontiers of humanity are reached. Our team consists of creative, open minded, caring and ambitious people who are determined to change the world. We aspire to continuously build impossible things and our ability to do so relies on building an incredible team. If you are driven to do the same, we'd love to hear from you.

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