Amazon has begun a search to hire a Digital Currency and Blockchain Product Lead for its Payment Acceptance & Experience Team, who are responsible for facilitating billions of online payments through the sites and services of one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world.
The crypto product lead will help Amazon to develop the company’s Bitcoin, digital currencies, and blockchain strategy. In addition, the candidate must be able to aid them to create a roadmap to launch such a strategy. The job post reads:
“You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed, drive overall vision and product strategy, and gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities.”
The new Crypto Product Lead will have to cooperate with other departments and services. This includes the Amazon Web Service (AWS) to work on a Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies-based strategy to be integrated into their customer experience, assets the company’s capabilities, and launch a technical strategy to complete the project.
“You’ll need to operate with a high level of autonomy and operate analytically, working backwards from data and customer insights to build new and innovative solutions to unsolved problems.”
Part of the qualifications required for the position includes over a decade of experience in product management, product marketing, and business or technology development. Also, Amazon wants the candidate to have a “deep understanding of the digital and cryptocurrency ecosystem” and “related technologies”.
In response to the June 22 job posting a spokesperson for Amazon said:
“We believe the future will be built on new technologies that enable modern, fast, and inexpensive payments, and hope to bring that future to Amazon customers as soon as possible.”
It is unclear at this point whether Amazon’s implementation of Bitcoin payment solutions will involve the use of the Lightning Network, or how Amazon will integrate Bitcoin into its user experience.
The position marks a decisive turn for the global e-commerce giant, whose products and services are ubiquitous online.
Back in November of 2017 Amazon Pay’s Vice President Patrick Gauthier explained that the company had no plans to accept Bitcoin because there wasn’t enough demand for it, and had only purchased Bitcoin-related domains to protect its brand.
At peak demand in 2017, Bitcoin reached a market cap of $336 billion. Four years and one halving cycle later the Bitcoin market cap broke $1 trillion.
If Amazon begins to facilitate payments in Bitcoin, it would be sure to introduce millions of users to the immutable distributed ledger technology, greatly hastening adoption and bringing us closer to a bitcoin standard.
Photo credit: David Becker, AFP, Source: Fintechs.fi