Procurement Operations Lead

Mercor•San Francisco, CA

10d•$160,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

Mercor is bringing on our first dedicated Procurement Operations hire to build our intake-to-PO infrastructure from the ground up. This is a high-impact, foundational role reporting to our Head of Procurement: you won't be running existing systems, you'll be designing and optimizing them on our current platforms — and then owning how they run day to day. You'll work at the intersection of Finance, Legal, Security, and Engineering, with direct exposure to how the business scales. If you like building order out of ambiguity and want your work directly tied to company growth, this is the role.

Requirements

4-8 years of experience in procurement operations, intake-to-PO processes, or an analytically rigorous operations role at a high-growth tech company.
Direct experience building procurement processes from zero — intake, approval matrices, vendor onboarding — not just operating within one that already exists.
Deep familiarity with procurement/P2P tooling (e.g. Ramp, Ironclad, Zip, or similar) and a bias toward automation over manual work.
Comfort building with and evaluating AI tools and agents, with the rigor to verify their output rather than take it at face value.
Working knowledge of AP and payment processes, so you can hand off cleanly to AP and troubleshoot upstream issues before they become AP's problem.
Strong business judgment — comfortable resolving exceptions, managing ambiguity, and making calls without a rulebook already written for you.
A builder's mindset: you'd rather design the scalable system than repeatedly patch the same manual process.
Excellent stakeholder communication — you can explain policy and process clearly to both internal teams and vendors.
Can-do attitude!

Responsibilities

Build and Own the Intake-to-PO Lifecycle: Design and launch our intake-to-procure process — intake triage, approval matrices, vendor onboarding, PO creation, and fast-buy paths like P-card programs, catalogs, and self-service purchasing — then run it day-to-day, identifying bottlenecks and driving issues to resolution with minimal oversight across business, finance, legal, security, and IT.
Re-architect Procurement with AI: Identify where AI agents, automation, and modern tooling can replace manual work, then build, deploy, and iterate. Verify AI output with rigor — anticipate failure modes, build in checks, and set the standard for how the team distinguishes trustworthy output from unreliable work.
Partner with Accounts Payable: Support vendor master data quality and PO accuracy, and help troubleshoot disputes upstream before they become an AP problem.
Be the Subject-Matter Expert: Provide clear, responsive guidance to stakeholders and vendors on procurement tools, policy, and compliance. Exercise sound business judgment on exceptions, and create and maintain training materials and knowledge-base content so process knowledge scales beyond you.
Metrics & Reporting: Build and maintain dashboards and reports that track procurement performance, surface trends and anomalies, and translate data into a clear narrative for leadership.
Cross-Functional Change Management: Lead or support change efforts tied to new processes and tooling, and represent Procurement in cross-functional initiatives.