Strategic Sourcing Business Partner, R&D Operations
$190,000–$230,000 year
HybridSan Francisco, California, United States or Seattle, Washington, United States
Job Summary
Own the commercial redline for Human Data Operations and R&D services agreements, partnering with Legal on MSAs, SOWs, and renewals to ensure deals move quickly while maintaining negotiation posture. Build and maintain the template library for standard MSA and SOW templates, pricing exhibits, SLA schedules, and fallback playbooks so most deals start on our paper. Lead pricing and commercial negotiations across the portfolio, from strategy and deal structure through terms, SLAs, and executive alignment. Manage vendor performance cadence for mission-critical vendors, including QBRs, scorecards, and SLA enforcement, while driving escalations between R&D teams and vendors to resolution. Design pricing structures that fit how R&D consumes services and build competitive benches via RFPs to ensure volume flexibility. Partner with Procurement Ops, Finance, and Security to understand upcoming needs and align vendor capacity ahead of growth.
Required Qualifications
- 7+ years of strategic sourcing, category management, vendor management, or commercial negotiation experience
- primarily in services categories (data services, BPO or outsourced operations, lab or research services, managed services, staffing, or similar)
- Hands-on contract experience: you have personally redlined MSAs and SOWs, built templates and fallback positions, and know where the commercial value sits in a services contract (pricing exhibits, volume commitments, termination rights, SLAs and remedies, IP and data terms) and when to bring in Legal
- A track record of personally leading multi-million dollar services negotiations to strong outcomes, not just managing the process around them
- Judgment about where leverage lives and how hard to use it: you can look at a portfolio of many vendors and many concurrent deals and know which ones deserve a deep negotiation and which need a fast, standard path, and you have a reputation with past vendors and colleagues for being commercially tough and fair with partners that need to scale with us
- Strong analytical skills: rate and unit-cost analysis, TCO modeling, and pricing model design; you can find the real economics underneath a vendor proposal
- Services vendor management experience: SLAs, scorecards, QBRs, and escalations, and how to enforce them without damaging the relationship
- Comfort operating at pace: high deal volume, ambiguity, imperfect information, and a bias to execute rather than perfect
- Clear, direct communication with executives internally and across the table, including in difficult conversations and escalations
- Fluency with AI tools in your daily work and demonstrated experience in rebuilding your own workflows around them
- Minimum education: Bachelor's degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
- Required field of study: A field relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience
- Minimum years of experience: Years of experience required will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position
- Currently, we expect all staff to be in one of our offices at least 25% of the time
Desired Qualifications
- Experience sourcing human data, data labeling, annotation, or evaluation vendors, or comparable BPO and outsourced operations categories, and a point of view on where that market is heading
- Experience sourcing lab services, scientific equipment and consumables, robotics or hardware services, or other technical services for a research organization
- Experience at a hypergrowth company renegotiating or restructuring vendor pricing and contract structures under the growth curve
- Experience standing up sourcing coverage for a category from scratch (templates, playbooks, benchmarks), not just operating within an established program
- Experience designing vendor scorecards, SLA frameworks, and performance management programs
- Familiarity with the confidentiality, data-handling, and IP terms that matter for research and data vendors
- A point of view on how AI will change services vendor relationships and negotiations, backed by things you have actually tried
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