Strategic Sourcing & Procurement

Mercor•San Francisco, CA

21h•Onsite

About The Position

Mercor is defining the future of work by partnering with leading AI labs and enterprises to provide the human intelligence essential to AI development. Our vast talent network trains frontier AI models. Mercor is creating a new category of work where expertise powers AI advancement. Achieving this requires an ambitious, fast-paced and deeply committed team. You’ll work alongside researchers, operators, and AI companies at the forefront of shaping the systems that are redefining society. Mercor is a profitable Series C company valued at $10 billion. This is a foundational hire: Mercor’s first Strategic Sourcer. You’ll own how we source and manage vendors across the full stack — standard SaaS, LLM API agreements, AWS compute, and technical contracts with reinforcement learning-as-a-service providers. You’ll build this function from scratch with direct impact on Mercor’s unit economics. The ideal candidate combines procurement expertise with technical fluency — you can run an RFP and negotiate an enterprise deal, but you also understand token economics, cloud pricing structures, and how ML teams actually build. You have an AI-first mindset and are energized by zero-to-one environments.

Requirements

6–8+ years in strategic sourcing, procurement, or vendor management at a high-growth tech company
Track record negotiating complex technology agreements, including usage-based, API-driven, and non-standard contracts
Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers on cloud architecture, distributed systems, and APIs — you don’t need to write code, but you need to understand how technical teams build
Experience managing cloud vendor relationships (AWS preferred) and familiarity with EDPs, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans
Analytical fluency: spend modeling, cost-per-unit economics, strong Excel/SQL skills a plus
An AI-first mindset and a builder’s instinct — comfortable starting from a blank slate and iterating quickly

Nice To Haves

Experience sourcing AI/ML infrastructure, GPU compute, or frontier model API agreements
Familiarity with reinforcement learning workloads, training infrastructure, or the MLOps vendor landscape
Background in finance, operations, or consulting in addition to procurement

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end sourcing for Mercor’s software and services portfolio — run RFPs, negotiate enterprise contracts (including usage-based and non-standard agreements), and manage vendor renewals
Champion Procure-to-Pay (P2P) adoption, driving compliance and reducing cycle time through automation and self-service tooling
Build scalable procurement processes and playbooks without creating bottlenecks
Own sourcing for Mercor’s AI infrastructure: LLM API agreements (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), token pricing negotiations, and volume commitment structures
Manage AWS and cloud compute relationships — negotiate EDPs and Reserved Instances, partner with DevInfra on cost allocation and chargeback
Partner with engineering to evaluate and contract for RL-as-a-service providers — structuring agreements around training run economics, compute SLAs, and data governance
Serve as a sourcing advisor to technical leadership on commercial risks, vendor options, and data protection requirements
Build a spend analytics function: track vendor spend, identify savings opportunities through benchmarking and competitive bids, and develop vendor scorecards and renewal calendars
Define purchasing policies and approval workflows; ensure all procurement activities are audit-ready
Serve as the primary procurement partner to Finance, Legal, Engineering, and Operations