Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations
Own the commercial strategy for Human Data Operations and broader R&D services vendors, including contract redlines, negotiations, pricing models, renewals, and performance management. The role requires 7+ years of services sourcing or commercial negotiation experience, strong analytical skills, and hands-on contract expertise.
About the job
Responsibilities
Contract management and templates
- Own commercial redlines for HDO and R&D services agreements, including MSAs, SOWs, order forms, amendments, and renewals, partnering with Legal on legal terms.
- Build and maintain standard MSA and SOW templates, pricing exhibits, SLA schedules, and fallback playbooks.
- Run the renewal calendar and ensure agreements do not auto-renew or lapse without a deliberate commercial decision.
- Maintain contract data, including rates, volume commitments, SLAs, and key dates, in contract and intake systems.
Negotiations and commercial strategy
- Lead pricing and commercial negotiations from strategy and deal structure through terms, SLAs, and executive alignment.
- Build AI-powered tools for redlining, negotiation preparation, benchmarking, and vendor reporting.
- Design pricing structures including per-unit, per-hour, capacity, tiered, and committed-volume models.
- Maintain competitive benches through RFPs, second sources, flexible volume allocation, and competitive pricing constructs.
- Track and report savings, cost avoidance, and improved commercial terms.
Vendor management and value creation
- Own QBRs, scorecards, SLA and quality reporting, and remedies for mission-critical vendors.
- Manage escalations between R&D teams and vendors and drive resolution.
- Identify consolidation, rationalization, and renegotiation opportunities and provide recommendations to R&D and Finance leadership.
- Manage TPRM, security, compliance approvals, audit rights, and data-handling terms with Security and Legal.
Partnerships
- Partner with Procurement Operations, R&D and special-initiative leaders, Finance & Strategy, Security, and Legal on vendor needs, budgets, forecasts, risk, and multi-year cost models.
Requirements
- 7+ years of strategic sourcing, category management, vendor management, or commercial negotiation experience, primarily in services categories.
- Hands-on experience redlining MSAs and SOWs, building templates and fallback positions, and negotiating pricing, volume commitments, termination rights, SLAs, remedies, IP, and data terms.
- Track record of personally leading multi-million-dollar services negotiations.
- Strong judgment, analytical skills, rate and unit-cost analysis, TCO modeling, and pricing model design.
- Experience managing services vendors through SLAs, scorecards, QBRs, and escalations.
- Ability to operate at pace amid ambiguity and high deal volume.
- Clear, direct communication with executives and vendors.
- Fluency with AI tools and experience redesigning workflows around them.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience sourcing human data, data labeling, annotation, evaluation vendors, BPO, or outsourced operations.
- Experience sourcing lab services, scientific equipment and consumables, robotics, hardware services, or other technical research services.
- Experience renegotiating vendor pricing and contract structures at a hypergrowth company.
- Experience establishing sourcing coverage, templates, playbooks, and benchmarks from scratch.
- Experience designing vendor scorecards, SLA frameworks, and performance-management programs.
- Familiarity with confidentiality, data-handling, and IP terms for research and data vendors.
- Experience applying AI to services vendor relationships and negotiations.
Compensation
- Annual compensation range: $190,000–$230,000.
Skills
Strategic Sourcing, Category Management, Vendor Management, Commercial Negotiation, Contract Redlining, Msa, Sow, Rfp, Tco Modeling, Sla Management, QBRs, Third-Party Risk Management, Data Handling, Ip Terms, Claude
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