Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Director

Cloud Operations + Innovation (CO+I) is the engine that powers Microsoft’s core cloud platforms and services that millions of people use every day. With more than 95% of Fortune 500 business on Azure, 180 million using Office 365, and millions using other services – all running on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure – CO+I builds and operates the foundation upon which Microsoft’s mission to empower every person and organization comes to life.  Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide. 

Within CO+I, the strategic Supply Chain team is responsible for establishing a supply chain that can meet the ever-growing Microsoft Cloud for our customers. We support a portfolio of complex, multi-disciplinary, multi-billion, multi-year datacenter construction and lease projects and operations of those assets. We are looking to fill a critical role of Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Director.   

In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively impact our culture every day. 

“Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.”

This role is located in Ireland or the UK.

This role is eligible for hybrid or remote work, up to 100%.

Responsibilities

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Drives the execution of strategies for business and industry engagements between sourcing teams and cross-functional corporate leadership to determine supply strategy at scale. Defines multi-year strategies for mature business, identifies opportunities to meet agility requirements, and enables business beyond standard purchase categories and historical spend areas. Develops solutions for highly complex and undefined business areas and purchasing categories and adapts delivery plans with cross-functional leaders. Leads industry and ecosystem engagements, proactively defines communication strategies with leadership teams, articulates business cases to support recommendations, and influences leaders to buy in on sourcing decisions and optimizations that can be deployed at scale.
• Directs supplier activity and progress across the most complex and strategic accounts and purchasing categories. Leverages corporate strategies to define overall objectives and strategies for supplier management practices to ensure alignment to Microsoft-wide business goals, and shares thought leadership that affects supplier engagement protocols and processes company-wide. Considers broad enterprise engagement opportunities and future supplier and partner innovations, to further optimize for value.
• Oversees and leads the pricing and negotiation strategies for the most complex and strategic purchasing categories, develops business groups for optimal cross-functional stakeholder support and business assurance, and broadly fosters internal and external partnerships to negotiate strategic decisions and produce deliverables. Drives consensus in the goals and success criteria with stakeholders both internal and external to Microsoft, shares thought leadership and socializes best practices related to negotiation and collaboration to enable teams to execute negotiations with consistent success.

 Procurement and Contracts

• Provides high-level negotiation and sets standards across organizations and company. Addresses unresolved or broadly impactful escalations related to pricing and category management issues, and proactively develops strategies to evaluate and drive change in processes broadly across the organization, as needed to ensure teams and/or partners adopt processes that improve the pricing and procurement of goods and services across Microsoft. Manages price and procurement requests and complex pricing issues across purchasing categories to ensure procedural compliance.
• Provides guidance and clarification on contract execution processes for consistency, accuracy, and timeliness across Microsoft. Provides thought leadership and shares best practices on established methodologies to ensure they are aligned with and influence current and anticipated business outcomes, both internally and externally. Drives accountability for resolving escalated contract delivery issues and monitoring the impact of change orders on contracting, and delivers briefings to