Director of Procurement

Synthesia Synthesia · Multimodal · London, United Kingdom · Operations

Director of Procurement for an AI video platform company, responsible for building and scaling the procurement function, defining sourcing strategy, leading negotiations, and establishing procurement workflows and policies. The role involves strategic sourcing across various spend categories including SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and professional services.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own strategic sourcing across key spend categories, including SaaS, cloud infrastructure, marketing, professional services, real estate, and facilities
  2. In a hyper-growth environment where speed matters, you'll build frameworks that enable the business rather than slow it down
  3. Partner with Legal on contract lifecycle management, ensuring risk-appropriate terms and timely execution
  4. Partner with Security on development of third party practices and process
  5. Drive vendor rationalization and preferred-vendor strategies that maximize leverage without compromising business velocity

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of progressive experience in procurement, strategic sourcing, or vendor management
  • Significant experience negotiating complex SaaS, cloud, professional services, and/or real estate contracts
  • Deep expertise in sourcing strategy, vendor selection, contract negotiation, supplier performance management, and cost optimization
  • A track record of managing multi-million-dollar budgets and delivering measurable savings and operational efficiencies
  • Familiarity with procurement and SaaS management tools
  • Strong cross-functional partnership skills, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders across Finance, IT, Security, HR, and Legal
  • Comfort reviewing and redlining commercial terms in close collaboration with legal teams
  • A structured, pragmatic approach to problem-solving, with the ability to operate both strategically and hands-on

Nice to have

  • An "AI first" mindset and curiosity about how AI can improve procurement operations
  • Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure and compute spend, particularly in AI/ML environments
  • A track record navigating real estate strategy and vendor partnerships in global, multi-office settings

What the JD emphasized

  • build and scale a new function
  • build the processes and systems from scratch
  • build frameworks
  • build the processes and systems from scratch