About this role
Founding Practice Lead — Delphi Digital
Delphi Digital is hiring a Managing Director to build and lead a new Stablecoins, Payments & Fintech advisory practice within our Research & Consulting business.
This is not a traditional business-development role. You will not inherit a finished product, a mature delivery team, or a predetermined sales playbook.
You will help determine:
• Where Delphi should compete
• Which clients and partners we should pursue
• What services we should offer
• How we win and deliver our first engagements
• What intellectual property we need to build
• How the practice should scale
You will operate like a founding partner inside a consulting firm, with meaningful ownership across strategy, revenue, client delivery, thought leadership, and team building.
The opportunity
Delphi has spent years building deep crypto-native expertise across:
• Stablecoins and tokenization
• Wallets, custody, and onboarding
• Payment and settlement infrastructure
• Liquidity and market fragmentation
• User adoption and retention
• Digital-asset market structure
• Incentive and network design
• Emerging financial infrastructure
We are now looking to bring that expertise to payments companies, fintechs, banks, investors, strategic acquirers, and advisory firms navigating the transition toward programmable money and onchain financial infrastructure.
Our goal is not to become a large implementation consultancy. We want to be the independent, opinionated strategic partner clients call when they need to determine:
• What is real versus narrative
• Where stablecoins create genuine commercial value
• Where traditional payment rails remain superior
• Whether to build, buy, or partner
• Which markets, products, and infrastructure providers matter
• Where the client has a credible right to win
• What actions it should take next
What you will own
Build the practice
• Validate the most attractive markets, customer segments, and buying triggers.
• Define Delphi’s initial service offerings, positioning, and pricing.
• Build the practice strategy, revenue model, and target-account plan.
• Identify where Delphi has a differentiated right to win — and where we should not compete.
Originate and close business
• Develop senior relationships across payments, fintech, banking, treasury, investment, and corporate strategy.
• Personally originate and close complex advisory engagements.
• Own discovery, qualification, scoping, pricing, proposals, negotiation, and account expansion.
• Convert initial projects into repeat engagements and retained relationships.
• Maintain rigorous pipeline, attribution, and forecasting discipline.
Build partner-led distribution
Develop relationships with firms that already have relevant client and transaction flow, including:
• Investment banks and M&A advisers
• PE and VC firms
• Corporate-development teams
• Consulting and strategic-advisory firms
• Law and accounting firms
Position Delphi as their specialist partner for commercial diligence, market assessment, private research, expert advisory, and digital-asset strategy.
Productize Delphi’s expertise
Initial service areas may include:
• Stablecoin and payments strategy
• Commercial and market diligence
• Private, opinionated research
• Retained strategic advisory
• Executive and board briefings
• Expert advisory
You will turn Delphi’s expertise into clearly scoped and repeatable offerings rather than a collection of unrelated bespoke projects.
Lead initial client delivery
• Personally lead the first anchor engagements.
• Establish the quality bar for institutional advisory work.
• Ensure our work is decision-oriented and difficult to replicate with generic consulting or AI-generated analysis.
• Convert early engagements into reusable frameworks, diagnostics, and intellectual property.
• Build a delivery model that can scale beyond your direct involvement.
Build authority and the team
• Work closely with Delphi Research and Delphi Media on high-conviction stablecoin, payments, and fintech themes.
• Publish or materially shape differentiated points of view.
• Participate in executive briefings, podcasts, industry events, and closed-door roundtables.
• Recruit and develop the delivery team as demand is proven.
Who you are
You bring significant experience across one or more of:
• Payments and fintech
• Banking or treasury technology
• Financial infrastructure
• Stablecoins and digital assets
• Enterprise partnerships
• Institutional advisory
You have:
• A demonstrated record of personally originating and closing meaningful institutional business.
• An active network across payments, fintech, banking, treasury, investment, or strategic advisory.
• Credible fluency in both traditional payment economics and crypto-native infrastructure.
• Experience selling complex, consultative engagements to senior decision-makers.
• The ability to create commercial opportunities without an established playbook.
• The judgment to explain where stablecoins create real value—and where they do not.
• The ability to turn an ambiguous client question into a scoped and priced engagement.
• Strong written, verbal, and executive communication skills.
• The willingness to remain hands-on across selling, delivery, thought leadership, and team building.
You should be equally comfortable speaking with a skeptical CFO, pressure-testing a payments strategy, closing a complex advisory engagement, leading a client workstream, and developing an opinionated market thesis.
What success looks like
During your first year, you will:
• Validate Delphi’s priority markets and customer segments.
• Define and launch the initial service portfolio.
• Build a high-quality direct and partner-led pipeline.
• Win several anchor clients and productive channel relationships.
• Establish a recognized Delphi point of view in stablecoins and payments.
• Create repeatable Research-to-advisory and Media-to-advisory motions.
• Build the foundation for a durable, multi-million-dollar practice
Over time, success means creating a practice with:
• Repeatable offerings
• Strong client references
• Recurring and retained revenue
• Healthy delivery economics
• Distributed client ownership
• A team and operating model that can scale beyond any one individual
Why join Delphi
This is an opportunity to build a new business using Delphi’s established crypto expertise, research capabilities, market relationships, and brand.
The role offers substantial autonomy, direct influence over the practice’s strategy and team, and a highly competitive compensation package with significant performance-linked upside and meaningful long-term incentives.
We are looking for someone who wants to build a business — not simply occupy a role.
Location
United States-based candidates are preferred. Proximity to New York, Miami, or another major financial services and payments hub is helpful but not required for an exceptional candidate.
Regular travel for clients, partners, industry events, and internal collaboration should be expected.
Express interest
Please share your résumé or LinkedIn profile along with a short note covering:
• Two or three significant engagements or partnerships you personally originated and closed.
• The first five companies or channel partners you would approach.
• One stablecoin or payments use case you believe the market currently overestimates.
• Why you believe Delphi has a right to win in this market.
• Why you want to build a practice rather than simply occupy a role.