Strategic Sourcing Manager

Vercel • San Francisco, CA

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

Vercel is seeking a Strategic Sourcing Manager to join their Procurement team. This role will be responsible for strategic sourcing of critical cloud infrastructure and AI providers, ensuring Vercel secures necessary compute, storage, and infrastructure capacity for scaling. The manager will develop commercial models that balance competitive economics with flexibility, avoiding growth-limiting commitments and creating transparent pricing that improves with usage. The role requires managing a fast-scaling spend and revenue, knowing when to expedite and when to maintain process, and collaborating with Legal, FP&A, and Security to facilitate deal closure. This position reports to the Head of Procurement. For individuals based within commuting distance of Vercel's offices (SF, NY, London, or Berlin), the role includes in-office anchor days on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.

Requirements

• Strong analytical skills, including rate/unit-cost analysis, TCO modeling, and pricing model design, to discern the true economics of vendor proposals.
• Comfort operating at pace in environments with high deal volume, ambiguity, imperfect information, and a bias toward execution over perfection.
• Clear, direct communication skills with executives, both internally and across the negotiating table.
• Significant strategic sourcing experience managing cloud infrastructure deals, with direct negotiation experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, or comparable infrastructure providers.
• Understanding of cloud infrastructure commercial models, including IaaS, compute, storage, consumption-based pricing, committed spend, discounts, and capacity agreements.
• Experience leading complex, high-value negotiations where rapidly changing consumption makes forecasting and long-term commitments challenging.
• Ability to evaluate tradeoffs between commitment, flexibility, unit economics, pricing transparency, and negotiating leverage as infrastructure usage scales.
• Experience partnering with technical and financial stakeholders to translate infrastructure requirements and forecasts into sourcing and negotiation strategies.
• Experience managing strategic supplier relationships and contracts through negotiation, execution, consumption monitoring, and renewal.

Nice To Haves

• Experience sourcing AI/ML infrastructure, data services, or technical services for an engineering-heavy organization.
• Experience negotiating directly with AI hyperscalers or providers of large-scale AI compute and inference infrastructure.
• Experience sourcing SaaS and other enterprise software alongside infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Lead sourcing strategy and commercial negotiations with cloud infrastructure providers and hyperscalers.
• Structure complex IaaS, compute, storage, and capacity agreements that balance committed spend, consumption growth, flexibility, and long-term unit economics.
• Design pricing structures (tiered, committed-volume, usage-based) that reflect Vercel's actual vendor service consumption and scale with growth.
• Own strategic sourcing for emerging AI infrastructure and hyperscaler relationships, including commercial models for high-volume or customer-facing AI workloads.
• Partner with Engineering, Finance, Legal, and other teams to forecast demand, understand technical requirements, evaluate suppliers, and leverage Vercel's growth for sourcing advantage.
• Analyze provider pricing, consumption patterns, contract structures, and market dynamics to identify opportunities for economic improvement and commercial risk reduction.
• Build and maintain AI-powered sourcing tools and playbooks (using Claude, V0, etc.) for redlining, negotiation preparation, benchmarking, and vendor reporting to enhance team throughput and deal quality.
• Help define the characteristics of an AI-native sourcing function at Vercel as spend and deal volume increase.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package, including equity.
• Inclusive Healthcare Package.
• Learn and Grow - mentorship and event attendance for networking and skill-building.
• Flexible Time Off.
• Provision of necessary gear and a WFH budget for space outfitting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed