VP, Corporate Development

About this role

About Us

Pearl is AI for professional services at global scale, combining advanced AI with verified human expertise to deliver help that is accurate, accountable, and fast. Since 2003, our network has connected millions of customers with licensed professionals across 196 countries, making real expertise available anytime, anywhere.

Our Values

• Data driven: Data decides, not egos

• Courageous: We take risks and challenge the status quo

• Innovative: We're constantly learning, creating, and adapting

• Lean: We focus on customers, using lean testing to learn how to serve them best

• Humble: Past success is not a guarantee of future success

About the Role

Pearl is seeking a world-class, market-facing corporate development leader to serve as VP, Corporate Development, with a demonstrated track record of identifying, developing, and closing meaningful transactions to accelerate our next stage of growth through M&A, strategic partnerships, and other high-value opportunities.

Reporting directly to our CEO, you’ll be a dealmaker, relationship builder, and strategic partner , helping shape Pearl’s corporate development and partnership strategy and leading complex transactions from initial relationship through diligence, negotiation, and close.

We’re building a global AI platform designed to empower independent professionals to grow, scale, and succeed. As Pearl enters its next chapter, we’re looking for someone who can take that story to the market - building relationships with potential strategic partners, investors, and other industry leaders while identifying opportunities that complement our organic growth strategy and accelerate enterprise value.

We’re looking for someone who can combine strategic perspective with hands-on execution. You’ll combine the instincts of a dealmaker with the judgment of an operator: understanding what drives strategic interest and enterprise value, identifying what Pearl can do to strengthen its positioning, and working across the company to translate those insights into action.

Success in this role requires more than evaluating opportunities that come through the door. You’ll proactively build relationships, create access, expand Pearl’s strategic reach, and have the transaction experience to carry opportunities through to close.

What You’ll Do

• Create Strategic Opportunities: Proactively identify and create M&A, strategic partnership, and other inorganic growth opportunities. Build and leverage relationships to get Pearl into the right conversations.

• Lead M&A and Strategic Transactions: Drive opportunities from initial thesis and relationship development through valuation, diligence, negotiation, structuring, and close, partnering closely with the CEO and executive team.

• Shape and Pressure-Test Strategic Opportunities: Evaluate market dynamics, strategic fit, value-creation potential, and risk to determine where Pearl can create differentiated value.

• Bring the Outside Market In: Translate insights from strategic partners, investors, and the broader market into actionable recommendations about Pearl’s strategy, positioning, portfolio, and value-creation priorities.

• Build Strategic Relationships: Develop and leverage relationships with strategic partners, investors, and industry leaders, and turn those relationships into meaningful business opportunities.

• Shape Inorganic Growth Strategy: Partner with the CEO and executive team to determine where acquisitions, partnerships, divestitures, or other strategic transactions can complement Pearl’s organic growth strategy and accelerate enterprise value.

• Create Strategic Partnerships: Identify, develop, and execute high-value partnerships that could expand Pearl’s capabilities, distribution, market access, product offering, or long-term strategic options.

• Strengthen Pearl’s Market Positioning: Help articulate Pearl’s strategy, differentiation, operating performance, and future potential in a way that creates credibility and excitement with sophisticated external audiences.

• Translate Strategy Into Value Creation: Identify the operating metrics, capabilities, portfolio decisions, and strategic initiatives that strengthen Pearl’s competitive position and long-term value, then work cross-functionally to advance them.

• Lead Transaction Readiness and Diligence: Ensure Pearl can move quickly and confidently when opportunities emerge, coordinating the financial, operational, and strategic work required for sophisticated diligence and transaction processes.

You Are

• A proven dealmaker who has personally identified, developed, negotiated, and closed meaningful transactions.

• A proactive relationship builder who knows how to identify the right people, create access, build credibility, and turn relationships into strategic opportunities.

• Someone who understands both sides of the table and can anticipate how sophisticated external stakeholders will evaluate a business, pressure-test its story, and identify risk.

• A strategic storyteller who can develop a compelling strategic thesis, determine what needs to be true for that thesis to hold, and translate it into concrete action.

• A hands-on leader who is comfortable moving from external relationship building and strategy into the details of diligence, negotiation, and execution.

• A compelling and concise executive communicator who can simplify complexity, read the room, listen actively, and adapt your message to CEOs, Boards, strategic partners, and investors.

• Commercially minded and able to connect product strategy, operating performance, market dynamics, and financial outcomes to enterprise value.

• Energized by fast-moving, founder-led environments where priorities evolve quickly and opportunities need to be created rather than waiting for them to arrive.

• Comfortable operating lean. You don’t need a large team or infrastructure around you to create impact.

What We’re Looking For

• A demonstrated track record of personal

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