Procurement Operations Business Partner, R&D Operations

Responsibilities

Procurement Operations

• Own the end-to-end purchasing path for R&D teams and special programs, from request intake through signed agreement, purchase order, receipt, invoice, and closure.
• Manage a high volume of purchase requests, work orders, change orders, renewals, and closures.
• Review vendor records, contracting entities, commercial documents, spend categorization, service dates, and required approvals.
• Determine and route requirements such as statements of work, order forms, amendments, security or privacy reviews, and third-party risk assessments.
• Launch and track contract reviews with Legal and confirm executed agreements support purchase orders.
• Structure purchase orders for fixed-fee, milestone, per-unit, and usage-based billing, including GL account, cost center, and service period coding.
• Manage research services vendors with master agreements, frequent work orders, and scope changes.
• Handle hardware, equipment, and lab purchasing, including quotes, lead times, shipping, receiving, and asset handoffs.

Financial Completeness and Accuracy

• Apply accurate GL account, spend category, cost center, and service period coding, understanding expense, prepaid, capitalized equipment, and operating-spend treatment.
• Partner with Accounting on services spanning periods, partially delivered milestones, usage billed in arrears, credits, true-ups, and amended work orders.
• Maintain the open purchase order book through receipt tracking, stale-line cleanup, coding corrections, and timely closures.
• Review month-end accruals, gather vendor and budget-owner estimates, and confirm or correct proposed amounts.
• Partner with Accounts Payable to resolve invoice holds, PO mismatches, and receiving issues.
• Support audits, commitment schedules, reporting requests, and control evidence.

Program Enablement and Stakeholder Partnership

• Establish procurement processes for new research programs in partnership with Legal, Security, and Finance.
• Run pipeline reviews with high-velocity teams to identify upcoming purchasing needs.
• Translate procurement, legal, security, and finance requirements for researchers and engineers.
• Provide responsive support through Slack channels and office hours, explain purchasing policies, and escalate blockers with context.

Continuous Improvement

• Maintain playbooks, intake guidance, and standard operating procedures.
• Identify process failures and opportunities for workflow automation and AI, including use of Claude for intake, document review, vendor coordination, and requester support.

Requirements

• Experience owning a high-volume purchasing portfolio end-to-end across procure-to-pay and an intake platform.
• Working knowledge of accrual accounting for purchasing, including accruals and reversals, service periods, cutoff, prepaid versus expense treatment, and GL and cost center coding.
• Experience supporting outsourced or managed-service vendors at scale.
• Understanding of how contract, security, privacy, and financial-control reviews fit into purchasing workflows.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5–7+ years of procurement operations, purchasing, or vendor operations experience, including work with research, engineering, hardware, or outsourced-services organizations.
• Experience supporting data operations, machine learning, reinforcement learning, or laboratory environments.
• Experience scaling procurement operations at a high-growth technology company.
• Accounting, accounts payable, or month-end close experience, including three-way matching.
• Experience with human-data, data-labeling, annotation, evaluation, BPO, or comparable outsourced-service vendors.
• Experience with Zip, Workday Financials, and Ironclad.
• Ownership of month-end accrual reviews or open-PO reconciliation for variable-spend portfolios.
• Experience designing tiered intake or approval frameworks.

Compensation

• Annual compensation range: $190,000–$230,000.