Strategic Sourcing Manager

The shape of it

In the posting’s own words

We are looking for a Strategic Sourcing Manager to join our Procurement team. You will own strategic sourcing for critical cloud infrastructure and AI providers, helping Vercel secure the compute, storage, and infrastructure capacity we need as we scale. You will develop commercial models that balance competitive economics with flexibility, avoiding commitments that constrain growth while creating transparent pricing that improves as our usage scales. Vercel's spend and revenue are scaling fast, and our sourcing motion has to scale with it — you'll know when to move fast versus when to hold the line on process, partnering closely with Legal, FP&A, and Security to get deals done without unnecessary friction. This role reports to the Head of Procurement.

What it asks for · 9

• Strong analytical skills — rate/unit-cost analysis, TCO modeling, pricing model design — able to find the real economics underneath a vendor proposal.
• Comfortable operating at pace: high deal volume, ambiguity, imperfect information, and a bias toward execution over perfection.
• Clear, direct communicator with executives, both internally and across the negotiating table.
• You have significant strategic sourcing experience owning the cloud infrastructure deals, including direct experience negotiating with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, or comparable infrastructure providers.
• You understand cloud infrastructure commercial models, including IaaS, compute, storage, consumption-based pricing, committed spend, discounts, and capacity agreements.
• You have led complex, high-value negotiations where rapidly changing consumption makes forecasting and long-term commitments challenging.
• You can evaluate the tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, unit economics, pricing transparency, and negotiating leverage as infrastructure usage scales.
• You have experience partnering with technical and financial stakeholders to translate infrastructure requirements and forecasts into sourcing and negotiation strategies.
• You have experience managing strategic supplier relationships and contracts through negotiation, execution, consumption monitoring, and renewal.

Also a plus

• Have experience sourcing AI/ML infrastructure, data services, or technical services for an engineering-heavy organization.
• Have negotiated directly with AI hyperscalers or providers of large-scale AI compute and inference infrastructure.
• Have experience sourcing SaaS and other enterprise software alongside infrastructure.

What the job covers

• Lead sourcing strategy and commercial negotiations with cloud infrastructure providers and hyperscalers.
• Structure complex IaaS, compute, storage, and capacity agreements that balance committed spend, consumption growth, flexibility, and long-term unit economics.
• Design pricing structures (tiered, committed-volume, usage-based) that reflect how Vercel actually consumes vendor services, and that scale with our growth trajectory.
• Own strategic sourcing for emerging AI infrastructure and hyperscaler relationships, including commercial models supporting high-volume or customer-facing AI workloads.
• Partner with Engineering, Finance, Legal, and other teams to forecast demand, understand technical requirements, evaluate suppliers, and translate Vercel's growth into sourcing leverage.
• Analyze provider pricing, consumption patterns, contract structures, and market dynamics to identify opportunities to improve economics and reduce commercial risk.
• Build and maintain AI-powered sourcing tools and playbooks (leveraging Claude, V0, etc) for redlining, negotiation prep, benchmarking, and vendor reporting — raising throughput and deal quality across the team.
• Help define what an AI-native sourcing function looks like at Vercel as spend and deal volume continue to climb.

Tools and skills named

Words the posting leans on

• infrastructure12×
• sourcing12×
• experience6×
• pricing6×
• deal5×
• economics5×
• negotiation5×
• providers5×
• scale5×
• cloud infrastructure4×
• consumption4×
• growth4×
• spend4×
• strategic sourcing4×
• commercial models3×
• commitments3×

Counted from the posting after the mission statement and the legal notices are set aside. The ones near the top are the ones a screener is looking for.

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