Global Category Manager - Infrastructure & Construction
About the job
- A bachelor's degree in Business, Supply Chain, Engineering, Construction Management, Finance, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Demonstrated category management leadership in construction, capital projects, real estate, or facilities, including building and executing category strategies, supplier segmentation, and governance models.
- Strong commercial expertise in construction contracting, including negotiations, delivery-model selection, indemnity and limitation of liability, insurance, and total installed cost/value analysis.
- Ability to lead in a global, matrixed organization by driving alignment across regions, project delivery, functions, and senior stakeholders.
- Experience integrating construction, contractual, safety, and supply-market risk into supplier and category decisions.
- Define and maintain a multi-year global category strategy for infrastructure and construction aligned to the capital plan, workplace and infrastructure priorities, and procurement goals, including value levers, delivery-model direction, and execution waves.
- Establish category scope and taxonomy across construction, architecture and engineering, construction/project/cost management services, EPC/PMC, MRO, and tool installation, using project pipeline, capacity, and regional construction-market dynamics.
- Develop and refresh a category roadmap that sequences initiatives by capital-program impact, urgency, risk, and market capacity, maintaining a forward-looking pipeline tied to the project portfolio.
- Own the framework for selecting a delivery model per project, including EPC, PMC, design-build, design-bid-build, or hybrid, balancing cost certainty, schedule, risk transfer, and the company’s control requirements.
- Guide selection of lump-sum, reimbursable, or guaranteed maximum price commercial structures and align delivery-model decisions with risk allocation and price-adjustment mechanisms.
- Partner with project delivery and engineering teams to bridge the ROM-to-BOM gap by aligning estimating maturity, scope definition, and contracting approach before commitment.
- Own supplier portfolio design and segmentation across general contractors, EPCs, PMCs, architecture and engineering firms, and specialty trades, and define engagement models for each segment.
- Lead strategic supplier relationship management for priority partners, covering performance, innovation, commercial governance, and executive alignment.
- Drive supplier rationalization, prequalification standards, and consolidation opportunities to improve leverage, ensure delivery capacity, and reduce total installed cost.
- Advise workplace and infrastructure, real estate, and project delivery leaders, translating capital-program objectives into category strategies and sourcing priorities.
- Lead category councils and governance forums, including value/risk reviews, supplier performance reviews, and delivery-model reviews, to drive decisions, alignment, and accountability across regions.
- Set stakeholder engagement rhythms and communication standards to create a consistent and predictable construction sourcing experience across EMEA, APAC, and the Americas.
- Define and govern the category value pipeline, including initiatives, baselines, assumptions, and milestones, and partner with Finance for validation and reporting.
- Establish and maintain rate-card databases and benchmarking for project management, construction management, quantity surveying, and construction services across Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
- Drive value engineering, should-cost modeling, and total-installed-cost analysis, and establish outcome metrics for schedule certainty, quality, safety, compliance, and risk reduction in addition to savings.
- Integrate construction and supplier risk considerations into category plans, including third-party risk, financial stability, safety/environmental health and safety performance, and capacity constraints.
- Partner with Legal, Risk/GIRM, and Insurance on indemnity, limitation of liability, insurance requirements, and price-adjustment mechanisms, ensuring alignment between contracts and project risk matrices.
- Monitor construction-market risks such as labor, materials, permitting, and weather exposure, and translate signals into contract protections, contingency, and alternative sourcing actions.
- Translate strategy into sourcing wave plans and playbooks/guardrails for Strategic Sourcing Managers and SCoE teams executing RFPs, prequalification, and negotiations.
- Oversee implementation progress and remove barriers, ensuring efficient handoffs between Category, Sourcing, project delivery, and Contracting/Legal.
- Refine strategy based on project outcomes, market feedback, and data insights through a strategy-to-execution feedback loop.
- Champion standard contract templates, prequalification standards, rate cards, and governance to reduce variability and improve speed and quality across the category.
- Coach and develop Strategic Sourcing Managers and SCoE practitioners, supporting the talent pipeline and enabling role clarity and clear governance boundaries.
- Lead change initiatives involving process standardization, supplier operating models, and digital procurement tools, and drive adoption across a globally distributed team.
- Experience sourcing for semiconductor, high-tech, or advanced-manufacturing facilities, including fabs, labs, cleanrooms, and complex tool-install/fit-out environments.
- Experience with major general contractor, EPC/PMC, and architecture and engineering firms and global construction supplier ecosystems.
- Experience developing rate-card databases, benchmarking, and value-engineering programs across multiple regions.
- Professional certifications such as CPSM, CIPS, RICS, or PMP, and/or an MBA or MS in a relevant discipline.
About the company
Applied Materials designs and builds precision machines that chipmakers and display manufacturers use to form, shape and inspect thin layers of material. Its platforms handle steps such as depositing films and removing unwanted material, helping chipmakers create transistors and wiring at atomic scale. Customers include makers of logic chips and memory, as well as manufacturers of advanced displays. The company earns money from equipment sales, replacement parts and services, and factory software that schedules production and monitors manufacturing processes. Applied Materials was founded in 1967 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Company Size
10,001+
Company Stage
IPO
Headquarters
Santa Clara, California
Founded
1967
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Installed equipment brings repeat business: Applied Global Services sells long-term service agreements, replacement parts and equipment upgrades.
- Sales are expanding: Applied's August 2026 report showed fiscal Q3 revenue of $9.12 billion, up 25% yearly.
- Employees join profitable operations: Applied reported $3.08 billion of operating profit for fiscal Q3 in August 2026.
What critics are saying
- Singapore manufacturing hires face late shifts: Applied's live engineering posting specifies 4 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. schedules.
- Export compliance has real costs: Applied and its Korea subsidiary settled a $252 million penalty in February 2026.
- Sales depend on China access: Applied's December 2025 filing attributed 30% of fiscal 2025 revenue to customers there.
What makes Applied Materials unique
- Applied combines manufacturing steps under vacuum: its Endura copper platform integrates seven processes to protect delicate material interfaces.
- Factory software reaches beyond chips: Applied SmartFactory serves battery and pharmaceutical manufacturers alongside semiconductor plants.
- Research targets future chip generations: Applied's EPIC partners work on technology three to four generations ahead of production.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
Relocation Assistance
Performance Bonus
Stock Options
Flexible Work Hours
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
0%1 year growth
-1%2 year growth
-1%A Motley Fool comparison of chip equipment maker Applied Materials and chipmaker Intel favours Applied Materials as the better 2026 buy, though the author suggests buying shares gradually. Applied Materials' revenue rose 25% to $9.1 billion in the quarter ended July 26, 2026, and net income rose 43% to $2.5 billion. Risks include cyclical demand and China, which made up 28% of revenue. In February 2026 it agreed to pay $252.5 million to settle US export allegations. Intel's second-quarter revenue also rose 25%, to $16.1 billion. It posted an $11.0 billion net loss, driven by a $12.5 billion noncash charge tied to its US government deal. Its foundry unit lost $2.1 billion, and an August share sale raising about $23 billion diluted existing owners. On valuation, Applied trades at 42.2x forward earnings against Intel's 77.7x.
Applied Materials (NASDAQ:AMAT) expects to gain more than two percentage points of wafer-fab-equipment market share by 2030, driven by demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The company outlined its strategy at the SEMICON West technology breakfast. Chief executive officer Gary Dickerson said AI spending is concentrating in leading-edge logic, DRAM memory and advanced packaging, which should make up about 75% of incremental industry growth. For 2030, Applied targets a 54% non-GAAP gross margin, a 40% operating margin and more than $12 billion in services revenue. It expects more than $1 billion in high-bandwidth-memory packaging revenue this year. The company plans to more than double its laboratory and manufacturing capacity, and return 80% to 100% of free cash flow to shareholders.
Applied Materials stock trades at 39.5 times adjusted earnings for the past twelve months, despite sales growth of just 7.8% over the period. The price leans on forecasts that sales will rise 36.3% between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2027, with profit growing 40.0%. Net margin is expected to widen from 27% in fiscal 2025 to 31% in fiscal 2027. On those estimates, the stock costs 38.7 times fiscal 2026 profit and 27.7 times fiscal 2027 profit. Sales growth reached 24.8% in the most recent quarter, up from declines earlier in the year. Management said clean room space at customers' factories will limit shipments in 2027, and costs could squeeze margins. The company presents to investors on October 13, 2026, at SEMICON West.
Applied Materials chief executive officer Gary Dickerson called AI the biggest economic "inflection" point of our lifetime. He spoke about the company's $5 billion EPIC Center in Silicon Valley, its research into next-generation chips, and surging demand for AI chips. Dickerson made the remarks on "The Claman Countdown.
Applied Materials unveiled its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization (EPIC) Center in Sunnyvale, California, on October 12, 2026. The $5 billion facility is billed as the world's largest dedicated to collaborative semiconductor process technology and equipment R&D. Chipmakers, systems companies, equipment partners and universities will work alongside Applied's engineers. Founding partners are TSMC, Intel, Samsung Electronics, Micron and SK hynix. Broadcom, Advantest, SCREEN, KIOXIA and Besi join as innovation partners, along with five research universities. The 600,000-square-foot building holds nearly four acres of cleanroom space. It aims to remove the handoffs between materials research, equipment development and pilot production, speeding new chip technologies to volume manufacturing for the AI era. Applied expects capital spending to scale to about $5 billion as customer projects begin.