Senior Director Strategic Procurement

Position Summary
SolarWinds is seeking a strategic and commercially minded Global Head of Strategic Procurement to define and lead the company’s enterprise procurement, travel, and spend-management strategy.
This senior leader will establish procurement as a strategic capability and enterprise partner—shaping how SolarWinds manages third-party spend, creates value, manages risk, and enables the business. The role will set the vision and operating model for

Strategic Procurement, and Travel; lead leadership alignment across the organization; and build a scalable, data-driven system that converts procurement activity into measurable business outcomes.
This leader will be accountable for a true cost-savings agenda, including incremental realized savings, supplier value, commercial discipline, process effectiveness, and leadership transparency. The role will also provide strategic advisory support for AI-related oversight and decision-making and lead the procurement-related component of the GRC risk review.

Strategic Leadership Priorities

• Define the enterprise procurement strategy: Establish the multi-year roadmap, value-creation agenda, category priorities, governance model, and decision rights for procurement, travel, and third-party spend.
• Create leadership alignment: Build proactive partnerships with Finance, Legal, IT, Security, HR, and business leadership to align spend decisions with enterprise priorities, risk appetite, and financial objectives.
• Build the procurement operating system: Establish the processes, data, technology, controls, and performance-management routines required to scale procurement and P2P as an enterprise capability.
• Lead a measurable value-creation program: Set the methodology, baseline, pipeline, governance, and reporting required to deliver and sustain realized savings, cost avoidance, supplier value, and commercial improvement.
• Shape strategic negotiations and supplier strategy: Personally lead the company’s most important negotiations and oversee the portfolio strategy, senior relationships, performance, and risk posture for strategic suppliers.
• Advance Travel and employee spend strategy: Establish the strategic direction for travel, expense, corporate cards, preferred suppliers, policy, adoption, and employee experience.
• Own P2P and procurement technology strategy: Serve as senior business owner for the P2P platform and related capabilities, ensuring that technology, workflows, data, and reporting support business adoption and control.
• Transform contracting and spend governance: Partner with Legal and business leaders to improve intake, prioritization, approval velocity, renewal visibility, and accountability for commercial decisions.

OneTrust GRC Governance

• Led the procurement-related OneTrust governance process from intake through ongoing monitoring. Establish clear ownership, decision rights, control requirements, and escalation paths across the procurement lifecycle.
  Team leadership and organization building
• Lead a high-performing Strategic Procurement team with the structure and capabilities required to scale the function over time. Serve as the senior escalation point for complex sourcing decisions, supplier issues, cross-functional conflict, and governance exceptions.

AI advisory Leadership
Help establish governance, oversight, and decision-making frameworks for AI-related suppliers, investments, use cases, and enterprise risk. Provide procurement and commercial perspective while partnering with the appropriate technology, security, legal, privacy, and compliance stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Significant leadership experience in strategic procurement, sourcing, category management, corporate spend, or a related enterprise transformation function.
• Demonstrated record of creating material, recurring value through sourcing strategy, negotiation, supplier portfolio management, demand management, and operating-model transformation.
• Experience establishing or transforming an enterprise procurement, P2P, contract lifecycle, travel, or supplier-governance capability.
• Strong senior-leadership presence, commercial judgment, and ability to influence decisions without relying solely on formal authority.
• Experience leading complex negotiations and managing senior supplier relationships.
• Proven ability to build governance, metrics, investment cases, and leadership reporting that connect procurement activity to enterprise outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience hiring, developing, and leading high-performing teams through organizational change.
• Experience partnering across Finance, Legal, IT, Security, HR, and business functions in a complex organization.
• Familiarity with third-party risk, GRC, control frameworks, and platforms such as OneTrust.
• Practical understanding of AI governance and responsible enterprise decision-making is preferred.
• Exceptional communication, analytical, organizational, and people-leadership capabilities.
• Navan experience preferred.

Measures of Success

• Strategic Procurement is recognized as an enterprise value-creation and business-enablement function.
• Incremental realized savings and validated cost avoidance materially exceed the investment in the function.
• Procurement strategy, P2P, travel, contracting, and supplier governance operate through a common, scalable management system.
• OneTrust provides a consistent, risk-based, and auditable governance process for procurement and third-party relationships.
• Senior stakeholders have clear visibility into addressable spend, savings, supplier commitments, renewals, controls, and risk.
• Contracting and purchasing decisions move with greater speed, consistency, and accountability.
• Strategic suppliers are actively managed against value, performance, resilience, and risk objectives.
• The team is appropriately staffed, engaged, developing, and accountable for measurable outcomes.

Leadership Profile

• The ideal candidate is an enterprise strategist and builder—someone who can set direction with senior leaders, translate strategy into operating mechanisms, and deliver measurable results through people, process, technology, and commercial leadership.
• This person brings the judgment to challenge the status quo, the credibility to align diverse stakeholders, and the operating discipline to build a durable procurement capability at SolarWinds.