Business Process Excellence Lead, Third Party Risk Management

Applied Materials • Austin, TX

1d • $108,000 - $148,500 • Onsite

About The Position

The Business Process Excellence Lead, TPRM owns the process architecture, design, and optimization for Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) and its integration with Contracting. The role defines and standardizes how work flows across the TPRM lifecycle, designs risk-appropriate and audit-ready controls, and drives measurable process improvements that expand the team's capacity through smart design and technology enablement. As the process architect for TPRM, this role translates business needs into clear process requirements that guide technology, automation, and AI investment, and targets manual, effort-intensive work for conversion into reusable capability designed once and reused across the portfolio. It partners with Legal and Contract Management to integrate contracting workflows with risk management processes. This is an individual contributor role that leads through expertise, governance, and cross-functional partnership. The ideal candidate is comfortable rapidly prototyping process solutions using no-code, low-code, or AI-powered tools to validate design intent. Production build and scale are delivered in partnership with Technology, AI, and Analytics teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Analytics, or a related field.
• 6+ years of process excellence, business process management, or equivalent experience, including hands-on process design and control optimization.
• Demonstrated process-architecture ownership and control optimization in a complex and/or regulated environment.
• Hands-on process mining experience (e.g., Celonis, Signavio, SAP Process Intelligence, or Power Automate Process Mining).
• Demonstrated ability to design new capabilities or operating models from concept through enterprise adoption.
• Proven ability to lead through influence in a matrixed, cross-functional environment, partnering with legal, technology, analytics, and business stakeholders.
• Strong executive communication skills, including the ability to translate complex process work into clear, decision-ready narratives.
• Data literacy and comfort using process performance metrics to drive prioritization and continuous improvement.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in procurement, TPRM, risk management, compliance, or supply chain process domains.
• Familiarity with contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms and third-party risk platforms.
• Lean Six Sigma certification (Green or Black Belt) or equivalent process discipline credential.
• Familiarity with automation (RPA, workflow, integrations) and/or AI-powered solutions (e.g., agents, chatbots), including partnering with technology teams to bring solutions to enterprise scale.
• Familiarity with no-code, low-code, or AI-powered tooling for prototyping and design validation.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end process architecture for TPRM and its integration with Contracting.
• Design, document, and standardize processes using industry-standard modeling techniques (BPMN, SIPOC, VSM, etc.).
• Define process ownership, hand-offs, decision rights, and escalation paths across the TPRM lifecycle and cross-functional partners.
• Establish process design standards, taxonomy, and documentation conventions for the function.
• Maintain a single source of truth for process artifacts, versioning, and change history.
• Continuously optimize TPRM processes to reduce cycle time, remove manual effort, and improve quality and consistency.
• Design and refine risk-appropriate, audit-ready controls that balance assurance with efficiency.
• Identify simplification opportunities, redundant steps, and low-value activities; propose and drive changes with stakeholders.
• Partner with internal audit and compliance partners to align control design with audit and regulatory expectations.
• Establish clear success criteria for every process change, including expected impact on cycle time, quality, and risk coverage.
• Apply process mining and other data-driven techniques to discover, measure, and prioritize improvement opportunities across the TPRM and Contracting processes.
• Establish process performance baselines and improvement KPIs (cycle time, throughput, rework rate, compliance rate) and build a fact-based improvement backlog prioritized by value, feasibility, and risk.
• Translate optimized process designs into clear business requirements that guide technology, automation, and AI investment, ensuring solutions are grounded in process design rather than tool preference.
• Prototype process solutions to validate design intent, using no-code, low-code, or AI-powered tools within Applied's AI governance framework, with production build and scale delivered by Technology, AI, and Analytics teams.
• Serve as the process voice in solution design reviews, ensuring build outcomes match intended process behavior.
• Partner with Legal and Contract Management to integrate contracting workflows with TPRM processes, ensuring risk decisions translate cleanly into contract terms, clauses, and post-signature obligations.
• Design and govern end-to-end hand-offs between TPRM and Contracting, including intake, risk assessment outcomes, clause requirements, and obligation tracking, to eliminate blind hand-offs, duplicate data entry, and rework.
• Support the design and governance of a risk-related standard clause framework in partnership with Legal and Contract Management, ensuring clause requirements are traceable to underlying risk assessments and controls.
• Partner on obligation and post-signature management processes (e.g., SLA reviews, security attestations, insurance renewals, right-to-audit exercises) so contractual risk coverage is enforced, not just documented.
• Establish a continuous-improvement discipline (e.g., Lean, Six Sigma principles) within the TPRM function.
• Track and report process performance and improvement outcomes to leadership on a regular cadence.
• Capture lessons learned and build a reusable library of process patterns, templates, and playbooks that scale as the Risk & Compliance function matures.
• Coach process owners and business partners on process thinking, improvement techniques, and disciplined change adoption.

Benefits

• Supportive work culture that encourages learning, development, and career growth.
• Opportunities to take on challenges and drive innovative solutions.
• Empowerment to push boundaries and learn every day.
• Programs and support for personal and professional growth.
• Care for employees at work, at home, or wherever they may go.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• Potential eligibility for other forms of compensation such as participation in a bonus and a stock award program.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior