Founding Procurement Lead, Customer Outcomes

Aron•Menlo Park, CA

5d•Onsite

About The Position

Aron is building an AI chief of staff for procurement. Procurement teams are responsible for enormous amounts of spend, but much of the work that could create value never gets done. Categories go years without being competitively sourced. Supplier negotiations get deferred. Savings opportunities sit buried across invoices, contracts, emails, and ERP systems. We’re building Aron to change that. Aron works alongside procurement teams to understand their spend, identify opportunities, run sourcing work, engage suppliers, and turn fragmented information into commercial decisions. We’re backed by Menlo Ventures and Storm Ventures and work with customers ranging from mid-market manufacturers to some of the world’s largest enterprises. We’re looking for an exceptional procurement operator to join the founding team. Your mandate is to make Aron indispensable to customers, then help turn learnings into product. This is not a traditional Customer Success role. You will own some of Aron’s most important customer relationships and the procurement work happening inside them. You’ll sit directly between customers and the engineering team. When Aron works, you’ll push it further. When Aron gets something wrong, you’ll understand why. When the product cannot complete the work yet, you’ll get the job done, then work with engineering so a human doesn’t need to do it the next time. You’ll have significant influence over what we build.

Requirements

Roughly 5-10+ years in procurement, strategic sourcing, category management, or procurement transformation and have been exceptionally good at it
Personally owned meaningful spend
Run competitive sourcing events
Negotiated with suppliers
Had to defend a sourcing recommendation to senior leadership
Dealt with terrible ERP data, incomplete specifications, difficult stakeholders, incumbent suppliers, and savings targets that still had to be delivered
Experience in manufacturing or industrial environments is particularly valuable
Exceptional operator
You are the person people give the difficult category to
Can go from a CPO conversation to a 20,000-line spreadsheet without losing energy
Commercially aggressive without being reckless
Notice when a quote is using the wrong unit before anyone else does
Don’t accept “the data is bad” as the end of an analysis
Can build trust with a supplier without becoming afraid to negotiate with them
Communicate complicated commercial decisions simply
Extremely detail-oriented but know when 80% is enough to move forward
Don’t need a playbook for every situation
High standards and low ego
Curious about technology and want to understand what AI can genuinely do rather than simply talk about it
Take ownership. When something isn’t working, your first instinct is to figure out how to fix it.

Nice To Haves

Experience in manufacturing or industrial environments is particularly valuable
You might come from companies such as Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Applied Materials, Honeywell, Danaher, Rockwell Automation, Flex, Jabil, or another world-class procurement organization.

Responsibilities

Own customer implementations and ongoing success
Understand each customer’s spend, suppliers, categories, constraints, and procurement priorities
Identify the highest-value work Aron should take on
Drive opportunities from raw data through sourcing and commercial decision
Build credibility with CPOs, category managers, finance leaders, and plant-level stakeholders
Track value rigorously from identified opportunity through realized savings
Identify opportunities to expand Aron’s role inside each customer
Diving into millions of dollars of messy spend
Determining whether two seemingly identical parts are actually comparable
Building and launching an RFQ
Finding additional suppliers
Challenging an incumbent’s pricing
Calling or emailing a supplier to get a bid moving
Normalizing quotes with different units, specifications, freight, payment terms, and MOQs
Running another negotiation round
Evaluating commercial and supply-risk tradeoffs
Preparing an award recommendation
Determining whether negotiated savings actually reached the P&L
Identify where Aron requires human intervention
Reproduce and diagnose workflow failures
Define what an excellent procurement outcome should look like
QA AI-generated recommendations
Translate recurring customer problems into product requirements
Help determine what Aron should automate next
Design workflows that work across customers rather than for a single account
Help Aron capture the context and commercial judgment that should matter the next time it performs the work