Vendor Management Lead

This is a newly created role in Heidi sitting under the Head of IT and working closely with Finance. As we've grown from startup to scale-up phase we need a single owner of our third-party software spend: what we buy, what we pay, and what we renew. The goal is to turn spend into a forecastable, auditable line item for Finance — proactive renewals, early overage detection, cleaner payment controls, and accurate P&L reporting — while freeing IT from commercial negotiation, giving them one accurate application/licence inventory tied to actual usage, and building security review directly into the purchase process.

Responsibilities

Renewals: A live register of every material agreement with notice periods, and enough lead time to run a real process; Negotiation: Set the strategy and walk-away position, then negotiates directly with vendor deal desks; Usage against commitment: Monitors consumption and seat utilisation, and flags overage exposure before it lands; Owns Implementation of Spend Controls: Implement stop gaps across material vendors to limit over consumption risk and improve internal cost savings; Rationalisation: Find duplicate tools, unused licences and utilisation gaps, and recommends cuts; Budget and forecast: Build the software budget line by line, tracks actuals, reports variance and savings; Payment set-up: Provision and control the cards, invoice details and billing entities behind every contract; Policy: Alongside IT, owns the procurement policy: approval thresholds, delegation of authority, who can commit Heidi to what

Requirements

Proven experience in software procurement, vendor management, or IT sourcing, ideally within a fast-growing SaaS or tech business; A track record of negotiating enterprise software agreements directly with vendor deal desks — you know how to set a walk-away position and hold it; Strong commercial acumen with genuine comfort reading contracts, usage-based pricing models, and consumption data to spot risk before it lands; Experience building and maintaining a software/vendor register — renewals, notice periods, licence counts, and utilisation — at a scale spanning dozens of active agreements; Solid financial literacy: you can build a budget line, track actuals against forecast, and report variance clearly to a finance audience; Comfort working cross-functionally between IT, Finance, and the wider business — you'll need to influence without formal authority over the teams actually using the tools; Experience designing or improving procurement policy — approval thresholds, delegation of authority, and payment/billing controls; A bias for action: this is a build-from-scratch role, so you should be comfortable creating process and structure where none currently exists, not just running an existing playbook

Nice to have

Exposure to vendor security/risk review processes, SaaS/cloud cost optimisation, or LLM/model vendor commercial arrangements

Benefits

$1,000 annual learning and development budget; $150/month health and wellness allowance; $500 home office budget; 26 weeks paid primary parental leave; 18 weeks paid secondary parental leave; fertility support up to $10,000; four weeks of work from anywhere per year; serious equity