Responsibilities
- Cultivates and manages productive relationships with key and strategic technology vendors to support service delivery, accountability, innovation, and long-term partnership value.
- Serves as a primary relationship point for strategic vendors, facilitating regular business reviews, performance discussions, escalation management, and alignment on organizational priorities.
- Evaluates vendor relationship health by monitoring responsiveness, service quality, partnership effectiveness, risk indicators, and ability to meet evolving business and technology needs.
- Defines strategies for vendor partnerships, including strategic, operational, tactical, and commodity vendor relationships.
- Manages the vendor engagement lifecycle, including sourcing, selection, contract negotiation, onboarding, governance, termination, and billing.
- Defines, implements, and manages core vendor governance processes, including scorecarding, risk management, performance reporting, and performance improvement.
- Reports quarterly to the Technology Leadership Team on the status, performance, risks, and value of key and strategic supplier relationships.
- Creates and incorporates contract amendments, including renegotiated terms and scope changes.
- Proactively identifies sourcing synergies across business entities and executes value opportunities.
- Works with Technology leadership and business partners to understand, define, and prioritize vendor and technology requirements.
- Builds and maintains institutional knowledge of vendor collaboration practices, governance expectations, relationship history, and lessons learned.
- Monitors the financial viability and management stability of key vendors.
- Monitors and analyzes spending trends to recommend future actions and identify savings opportunities.
- Assists business partners with the development of business cases and return on investment calculations for new technology investment initiatives.
- Provides training and coaching to business partners on vendor management practices.
- Analyzes problem areas and helps resolve vendor-related issues, escalations, and disputes.
Requirements
- 8+ years of technology experience, including at least 5 years of direct vendor management, operations management, or vendor oversight experience.
- Proven ability to lead vendor management practices across sourcing, Request for x (RFx) processes, contract negotiation, onboarding, governance, performance management, and issue resolution.
- Strong understanding of the technology services landscape, including technology architecture and planning, technical requirements, development methodologies, outsourcing models, service offerings, pricing, and delivery structures.
- Experience with financial management, spend analysis, business case development, return on investment calculations, and identification of savings or value opportunities.
- Demonstrated ability to create, modify, and improve processes, procedures, reporting, and governance practices.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, attention-to-detail, and decision-making skills.
- Strong stakeholder partnership skills, including the ability to communicate clearly, mentor others, and work collaboratively with Technology, business, Finance, Procurement, Legal, and vendor partners.
Nice to Have
- Software engineering, system administration, or related technical background.
- Experience developing technical documentation, use cases, road maps, or vendor performance reporting.
- Experience scoping, scheduling, and managing technology projects.
Benefits
- A comprehensive list of benefits available to full-time employees can be found here.
Work Arrangement
Hybrid — Chicago
