Director, Partnerships, Greater China

About the role

Shopify has no office in mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. This role is what we have instead.

Chinese merchants are building some of the fastest growing direct-to-consumer brands in the world, and they are building them for customers outside China. Greater China export is a top global priority, with product, infrastructure, and go-to-market investment landing behind it now. None of it reaches merchants without partners, and no partner in this market commits to a platform they have not met in person.

You are the face of Shopify partnerships in Greater China. In market, in the room, at the dinner, on the stage. You build the relationships that turn into merchants, and you find the opportunities nobody has written down yet.

You build on an ecosystem of more than a thousand active agencies, system integrators, developers, and technology partners, alongside the domestic commerce platforms that hundreds of thousands of Chinese merchants already sell on. Uniquely across Asia Pacific, technology partners here outnumber agencies, which changes what the ecosystem can do and how you build it. You own it end to end, and you are accountable for what it produces: merchants launched, merchants that survive and grow, and a partner base that gets measurably better at Shopify every quarter.

The work is genuinely unfinished. Partner capability is uneven, merchant success after launch is low, and the operating model is still being built. You will be making calls with incomplete data, in a market that moves faster than most, on one of the biggest openings Shopify has.

What you'll own

• Agency and SI partnerships across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, including the managed partner portfolio and the team that runs it.

• Technology partnerships, including export-focused partners and the global platform relationships that matter most here.

• The import motion, currently run centrally and transitioning to you.

• Platform and joint venture relationships, including the domestic commerce platforms that are our most scalable route into the merchant long tail.

• A growing in-market team, including a Partner Solutions Engineer and a Partner Marketing Manager, both new roles.

What you'll do

Be Shopify in this market

• Be in market constantly. Partner offices, factory floors, merchant warehouses, industry events, dinners. Deals here get made in person, by people who keep showing up.

• Build a personal network at the top of the ecosystem: agency founders, platform executives, trade association leaders, and the category leaders in the export verticals that matter. Be the call they take.

• Create opportunities that are not on anyone's plan. Invent the pilot, the coalition, the program, the event. Test it with a handful of partners in weeks and scale what works.

• Move at the speed of the market. A good idea executed this month beats a better idea next quarter.

• Carry Shopify's story publicly: stage, press, WeChat, industry forums, partner communities. Be the reason a Chinese founder has heard of us.

Own the Greater China partner strategy

• Set the partner strategy for mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan: which partners we recruit, which we invest in, which we scale, and which we let go. Reason from first principles rather than the orthodox answer, and defend those calls with evidence.

• Build the partner base against where merchant demand is actually going: cross-border D2C, brand building in Western markets, and enterprise migration off local and legacy platforms.

Drive launches, merchant success, and partner capability

• Own the volume and the quality of partner-led merchant launches. Chinese agency partners already launch hundreds of stores every quarter. Far too few of those merchants go on to succeed.

• Hold partners accountable for what happens after launch, not just at it: traffic, conversion, and merchant survival. This is the number that matters most in this market.

• Own partner-sourced pipeline and the commercial relationship with the Greater China sales, solutions engineering, and marketing teams, and lift partner-led merchants into higher value plans.

• Most Chinese sellers compete on price and product rather than brand, and lack the fundamentals of Western direct-to-consumer commerce. Build the enablement model that makes partners genuinely good at teaching this, in market and in language, and take them from selling Shopify to architecting and delivering on it.

• Localize Shopify product launches and roadmap changes so partners can act on them in weeks rather than quarters.

Build a scaled motion into the long tail

• The long tail of Chinese export merchants is the largest opportunity here and the most expensive to serve directly. Design the motion that reaches it: partner-delivered, platform-delivered, and product-delivered rather than headcount-delivered.

• Own the relationships with domestic commerce platforms that can acquire and train merchants at scale on our behalf, including train-the-trainer models that use their existing sales and operations teams. Prove the unit economics before we scale, and kill what does not work.

Build and lead the team

• Lead and grow a distributed, in-market team with clear ownership, high standards, and a high pace. Onboard new roles as they land, absorb the responsibilities currently held centrally, and build the team through addition and subtraction.

• Coach the craft yourself. You will be in partner meetings, on deal reviews, and in the detail, not managing from a dashboard.

• Be the credible internal voice for Greater China with Shopify's global partnerships, product, and commercial leadership. Surface problems early, with a solution attached.

Multiply the market's impact with AI

• Merchant willingness to pay for professional services here is very low. AI is the most credible way to serve a long tail that will not pay for people, so push AI adoption into the partner ecosystem and into the tooling partners put in front of merchants.

• Use AI across your own work and your team's. Aim for what was not possible before, not marginal time savings, and own the output whether AI generated it or not.

What success looks like

Within your first six months, you will have:

• Built a named relationship map across the top agencies, technology partners, platforms, and industry bodies in the region, with you personally connected at decision-maker level across most of it.

• At least two opportunities in flight that were not on the plan when you joined, sourced from your own network and time in market.

• Published a clear Greater China partner strategy across agencies, technology partners, import, and platform relationships, with a named portfolio, explicit investment choices, and the metrics you own.

• Improved the quality of partner-led launches, with evidence that merchants launched by partners are surviving and growing, and delivered against partner-sourced pipeline targets.

• Stood up at least one scaled long-tail motion with real merchant volume and unit economics you can defend.

• Onboarded the new in-market roles, absorbed the responsibilities transitioning to you, and become the person the Greater China commercial, product, and marketing teams call when they need a door opened.

What you'll bring

• An existing, activatable network across the Greater China partner landscape: agencies and system integrators, technology partners, domestic commerce platforms, potential joint venture partners, and industry and trade associations. You should be able to open doors in your first weeks, not your first year.

• Evidence you create opportunities rather than manage them. You have built something from nothing: a market, a business, a category, a partner motion. You can point at deals that exist only because you made them exist.

• Presence and persuasion. You can hold a room, host a table of founders, and be the person they want to work with. Here the relationship comes before the contract.

• Relentless energy, and the follow-through to convert it.

• Ten or more years in partnerships, channel, alliances, or ecosystem roles with significant time in Greater China, or an unconventional path that produced the same network and the same results.

• Native Mandarin language proficiencies to liaise with clients in the Greater China Region and professional English. You can hold a technical discussion with a partner CTO in one and a commercial forecast review with global leadership in the other.

• Deep knowledge of the Chinese export ecommerce ecosystem, and enough credibility on brand building and Western direct-to-consumer fundamentals to be taken seriously by a merchant who has only ever competed on price.

• A record of owning a business outcome through partners, not just relationships, with the discipline to forecast it and hit it, and experience building a leveraged motion where reach grew faster than headcount.

• Experience leading distributed teams across markets and time zones, and comfort with ambiguity: incomplete data, evolving tooling, and a strategy being written as you go.

• Technical fluency with software platforms and integrations, enough to hold a credible conversation with a partner about what they are building.

• Demonstrated use of AI in your day-to-day craft, with examples of how it changed your scale, speed, or quality of decisions, and strong written communication. Much of your influence at Shopify is exercised in writing, to people you have never met.

Nice to have

• Experience in commerce, ecommerce, or SaaS, particularly cross-border.

• Cantonese, in addition to Mandarin and English.

• Experience standing up a partner motion in a market without a local Shopify presence.

How you work

• You would rather be in a partner's office than an internal meeting.

• You are unorthodox. You find the angle nobody else saw, and you test it before anyone gives you permission.

• You ruthlessly prioritize. Mission critical work gets resourced and everything else stops, and your team knows the difference.

• You ship weekly, not quarterly.

• You take extreme ownership. You dive deep into the details of your team's work and you own its mistakes.

• You invite challenge, including your own ideas, and you let the best idea win. You resolve conflict rather than route around it.

• You put Shopify first, ahead of the org, the team, and yourself.

How this role is structured

This is a build-phase role inside a dedicated, in-market China team. Ecosystem aim and strategy for the market is set by Shopify's VP of Product for China. You own partner strategy and execution against that aim, and you report to the Director of Partnerships for Asia Pacific.

You are the most senior Shopify partnerships leader in Greater China and you carry that externally. The title exists to open doors. Use it.

As the in-market team is staffed through the coming year, the longer term reporting structure will be confirmed. Expect to help shape it rather than inherit it. If a settled org chart is what you need to do your best work, this is not the right role.

Location and travel

Based in Singapore, working standard Greater China business hours with flexibility for teams in Singapore, Australia, and North America.

Expect to be on the road at least half your time across mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, plus occasional regional and global travel. This is not a role you can run from a desk in Singapore.