Procurement Operations Business Partner (Contract)

JOB DESCRIPTION

Reason: Procurement Operations purchase request volume has grown
Location: In Office: San Francisco (preferred), Okay with Seattle or New York; Preferred days flexible, but 2 to 3 days per week in line with team norms.
12 months with potential to extend
Could have another HC for this need if they find 2 qualified candidates through this request
Notes: Finance team requires a procurement operations coordinator, specialist, or analyst to handle high operational volume. The position relies on the ZIP platform to review purchase requisitions and contract documents, coordinate with legal, security, and the people team, and participate heavily in the month-end close process. The role as primarily tactical, designed to shepherd purchase requisitions through the system and translate procurement, finance, and legal terms into digestible language for business partners. They are seeking a "doer " focused on tactical buying and execution rather than strategic sourcing or influencing business decisions. Candidates should have experience at scaling and growing organizations and thrive in a fast-paced environment.

JD: Procurement Operations Business Partner (Contract)

mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the Role
Every team at buys things, from software and professional services to research services, marketing, benefits, and facilities, and purchasing volume is growing quickly as the company scales. Procurement Operations is the front door for all of it. We sit inside Finance Operations and partner every day with requesters, Legal, Security, Privacy, IT, and Accounts Payable to get purchases reviewed, contracted, and issued cleanly and compliantly on Zip, Ironclad, and Workday.
We are hiring a Procurement Operations Business Partner on a contract basis to add capacity as that volume grows. You will own the primary procurement relationship with a set of business teams such as G&A, People and Workplace, and Product, and flex across them as needs shift. The job has three parts. First, be the front door for your teams' purchase requests and get each one review ready. Second, coordinate the cross functional reviews and contracting that move a request to a signed agreement and an issued purchase order. Third, keep your portfolio's purchase orders and spend data clean through change orders, invoice questions, and month end. Success means requesters in your portfolio know exactly who to go to, their purchases move predictably, and Finance can trust the data behind them.

We use Claude as part of our daily workflow and are looking for someone who wants to help define what an AI native procurement operations function looks like, including how AI changes intake, document review, and requester support over the next few years.

This is an excellent role if you are detail oriented, learn new systems quickly, ask good questions about the why, and get satisfaction from unblocking other people rather than being the final decision maker. You can own a queue beginning to end with minimal supervision, and you escalate thoughtfully.

How This Role Fits Within Procurement

Procurement Operations Business Partners own the primary relationship with each business vertical and are the front door for intake and day to day purchasing requests. Strategic Sourcing partners closely with us and owns the commercial outcome for larger vendor relationships, including negotiation strategy, contract terms, and ongoing vendor performance. Day to day you will work most closely with Legal, Security, Privacy, IT, and Accounting, the teams that review contracts, assess vendor risk, and keep the books accurate. You will report to the Procurement Operations Business Partner Lead.

What You Will Do

• Serve as the day to day procurement partner for a portfolio of business teams, guiding requesters from initial request to an approved purchase order and a signed agreement.
• Review purchase requests and their supporting documents, including quotes, statements of work, order forms, and vendor agreements, for completeness, accuracy, and alignment with procurement policy, and coach requesters on what a clean submission looks like.
• Coordinate cross functional reviews with Legal, Security, Privacy, IT, and Finance so each purchase reaches the right stakeholders the first time and keeps moving, and step in to unblock requests that stall.
• Translate procurement, legal, and finance requirements into plain language for business partners, and represent the business need clearly back to those review teams.
• Manage purchase orders across their lifecycle, including issuance, change orders, and periodic open PO reviews, so the contract, the PO, and vendor invoicing stay aligned.
• Partner with Accounts Payable and vendors to resolve invoice and payment questions tied to your portfolio.
• Support month end close by gathering spend and accrual inputs from budget owners and vendors and explaining notable variances for your portfolio.
• Be a visible, responsive point of contact for your business teams in Slack and office hours; resolve routine questions quickly and escalate true blockers with context.
• Maintain playbooks and process documentation for the areas you own, and bring forward practical improvements, including where automation and AI tools such as Claude can remove manual work.

What We Are Looking For

• Roughly 3 to 5 or more years in procurement operations, purchasing, accounts payable, finance operations, contract administration, or a closely related operational role.
• Hands on experience running purchase request intake through purchase order in a procure to pay tool such as Zip, Coupa, Workday, NetSuite, or similar, at a company with meaningful volume.
• Working knowledge of how contract review routes between procurement, legal, security, and the requester, and what a clean SOW or order form needs to contain.
• Solid grounding in financial controls, including GL and spend category coding, accruals, and why the contract, PO, and invoice need to agree.
• Comfort working across many spend categories, for example software and SaaS, professional services, marketing, HR and benefits, and workplace and facilities, rather than deep specialization in one.
• Detail orientation. You catch errors, validate data, and follow through on loose ends, and you enjoy this work rather than resent it.
• Problem solving. You drive issues to resolution and solve for the root cause, not just the immediate ticket.
• Communication. Clear, thorough written communication; you can answer multi part questions and explain process to non finance stakeholders without jargon.
• Collaboration. You work well across teams and are comfortable asking questions and escalating appropriately rather than guessing.
• Flexibility. Fast paced, high growth environment where ambiguity is normal; you can reprioritize without perfect information.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience with Zip, Workday Financials, Ironclad, Slack, and Google Sheets.
• Exposure to software security reviews, third party risk or privacy reviews, or SaaS contracting.
• Prior month end close, accrual, or vendor reconciliation work alongside an accounting team.
• Experience at a high growth technology company where process is still being built.
• A habit of using AI tools such as Claude to speed up research, drafting, and data cleanup in your own work.