Senior BDM (SIS)

About the role

Senior Business Development Manager, APAC — Seismic Instrumentation
Singapore or Malaysia | Field-based | APAC Territory



Most sales roles ask you to respond to tenders. This one asks you to shape them before they exist.

Our client is a privately held, 40-year-old seismic technology manufacturer whose instruments sit inside national earthquake monitoring networks and tsunami early-warning systems in more than 90 countries. They are hiring their first dedicated seller for the southern half of Asia Pacific.

Around 95% of the business is sold into government agencies, national seismic monitoring networks and academic research institutions. In this market, technical specification typically carries 40–50% of the evaluation weighting and price 30–40%, which means the tender is usually decided long before it publishes. Your job is to be there first.
The territory
India is the primary market, followed by Australia and New Zealand. South East Asia is upside if you can carry it. India alone holds 10–12m in live tender value today, and roughly 4m has already closed across the region this year.

This is a replacement, not a new patch. The pipeline exists and is waiting for an owner.
What you'll actually do
Find where procurement is forming before anyone announces it. Build relationships with the technical specifiers inside government agencies and monitoring networks. Position early enough that the eventual specification reflects what you sell. Present at geological conferences and workshops. Forecast honestly to global leadership.

What you will not do is write bid documents, chase logistics, build quotes, or manage compliance. There is a dedicated tender manager and a full head-office support function, plus an inside-sales coordinator who routes you to the right specialist. The role is deliberately scoped so you stay on the front end.

Deals run from a few thousand dollars for parts and sensor replacements up to tenders worth 1–2m. One live example is a three-phase national project where phase one went to open competition and the remaining phases are still shapeable.

Travel is one to two trips a month across the region, sometimes more.
What you need
5–10 years selling instruments or technical systems, from the manufacturer side, as an agent, or through a reseller. You have carried a number and closed it.
Genuine government tender and public procurement experience in APAC, including at least one example where you influenced a specification before it published.
Commercial experience across South East Asia and South Asia.
The right to work in Singapore, Malaysia or Indonesia.
Comfort being the only commercial person in the region, with your support sitting in another time zone.
What helps but isn't essential
A background in geophysics, geology, seismology or Earth Sciences.
Working knowledge of seismic or geophysical instrumentation, particularly broadband seismic.
Experience managing resellers, agents or partners.
Exposure to scientific instrumentation, environmental monitoring, gravimetry, magnetics, geo survey or long-term data acquisition.
Distributed Acoustic Sensing over fibre optics.

The hiring manager has been explicit on this point: he would rather find a strong commercial operator and teach them the science than find a seismologist and teach them to sell. If you are good at the tender game and technically curious, the domain knowledge is trainable.
Compensation
80/20 base to variable. Singapore 90–144k total package. Malaysia 68–102k total package.

Why this one is worth a conversation

You inherit a live pipeline rather than a blank territory. The company is private, profitable and 40 years old, so decisions get made on merit rather than on a funding cycle. And the product does something worth doing: these systems give people minutes of warning before an earthquake or a tsunami reaches them.



Interested, or know someone who would be? Send me a message.

Bluebird Recruitment is managing this search exclusively on behalf of our client.