Foundever—Director, IT Vendor Management Office (VMO)

Job description

Description: About Us Foundever is one of the world’s leading customer experience (CX) companies, delivering outsourced sales, technical support, customer service, and other business processes for many of the world’s largest brands. Foundever securely connects brands with their customers millions of times each day in more than 60 languages, supported by approximately 150,000 associates across 45 delivery countries. Job Summary The Director of the IT Vendor Management Office (VMO) is a strategic commercial leader who both sets the direction of Foundever’s global IT vendor management capability and personally drives its execution. As the single point of accountability between IT and its external suppliers, this leader owns the end-to-end commercial, performance, and governance relationship across the global IT vendor portfolio — software, cloud, telecommunications, hardware, infrastructure, and technology services, with the deepest hands-on ownership in infrastructure and telecom. The Director will stand up the operating model and get hands on the work: leading major negotiations, running renewals as deliberate leverage events, enforcing service levels, and holding vendors accountable for outcomes. Partnering with IT, Finance, Procurement, Legal, Information Security, and business stakeholders, this leader optimizes technology spending, improves vendor performance, reduces commercial and operational risk, and ensures every third-party investment delivers measurable business value — translating it all into clear executive recommendations tied to P&L impact. Primary Job Responsibilities VMO Operating Model & Governance ● Own the model. Design, stand up, and run Foundever’s global IT VMO operating model — decision rights, policies, approval workflows, governance forums, and executive escalation paths — then drive adoption across IT. ● Set the standards. Establish consistent standards for vendor selection, onboarding, contracting, performance management, renewal, risk, and offboarding, including commercial, technical, security, and redundancy reviews. ● Tiered governance. Run a tiered vendor-management framework — executive business reviews for strategic partners, operational reviews for the rest — with clear governance for strategic, preferred, and transactional vendors. ● Build the team. Develop a high-performing VMO team and strengthen vendor-management capability across IT, building cost transparency by vendor, category, technology function, region, and cost center. Technology Spend & Portfolio Optimization ● Full visibility. Establish comprehensive visibility into global third-party IT spend, contractual commitments, consumption, utilization, and total cost of ownership. ● Hunt waste. Assess the portfolio to eliminate overlapping technologies, duplicate licenses, unused subscriptions, shelfware, fragmented purchasing, and unfavorable terms. ● Rationalize. Develop and execute multi-year vendor and technology rationalization plans that reduce cost while protecting service performance and business continuity. ● Prove it. Track negotiated savings, cost avoidance, realized benefits, and forward commitments in partnership with IT Finance, and feed clear vendor-spend analysis into annual planning, budgeting, forecasting, and cost-transformation. Infrastructure & Telecommunications Cost Management ● Own the estate. Provide commercial oversight and hands-on management across telecom and infrastructure — connectivity, voice, carrier agreements, colocation, hosting, hardware, maintenance, and site-level services. ● Optimize consumption. Run portfolio reviews to surface underutilized services, redundant circuits, aging contracts, fragmented spend, and rate-optimization opportunities; partner with Network, Telecom, Cloud, and Infrastructure leaders to consolidate demand. ● Lead the deals. Lead carrier and service-provider negotiations using market benchmarks, competitive alternatives, and Foundever’s global purchasing scale. ● No surprises. Maintain forward-looking visibility into contract expirations, notice periods, minimum commitments, and renewals to prevent unplanned auto-renewals. Vendor Commercial & Contract Management ● Drive negotiations. Lead commercial management of major IT vendor relationships — sourcing, renewals, pricing negotiations, benchmarking, contract restructuring, and competitive evaluations. ● Contract lifecycle. Establish a contract lifecycle-management process and centralized inventory covering intake, approval, execution, obligations, pricing commitments, renewals, notice periods, risks, and termination. ● Every renewal is a decision. Treat major renewals as deliberate, leverage-driven events — reassessing requirements, consumption, vendor performance, competitive alternatives, and commercial structure. No autorenewals, no lapses. ● Playbooks. Develop commercial standards and negotiation playbooks covering pricing, volume flexibility, product substitutions, service levels, termination rights, price protections, renewal caps, and exit requirements. ● Partner to close. Work with Procurement and Legal to negotiate competitive agreements that address security, privacy, compliance, resilience, data ownership, business continuity, and transition. . Vendor Performance & Relationship Management ● Single point of accountability. Serve as the primary escalation point and relationship owner between internal IT/infrastructure teams and external providers. ● Enforce SLAs. Define, baseline, and enforce service levels, operational KPIs, risk indicators, and service credits; run quarterly business reviews, executive scorecards, and continuous-improvement plans. ● Hold vendors accountable. Hold vendors to contractual commitments, service performance, remediation, innovation, and expected business outcomes; partner with IT Operations, SRE, and Problem Management to fix recurring vendor-related incidents at root cause. ● Act on underperformance. Drive corrective action plans and, where performance doesn’t improve, recommend renegotiation, competitive sourcing, or transition. Vendor Risk, Compliance & Business Continuity ● Lead IT TPRM (Third-Party Risk Management). Partner with Information Security, Enterprise Risk, Legal, Compliance, and IT Operations to assess and manage third-party technology risk. ● Ensure compliance. Ensure vendors meet Foundever’s security, privacy, resilience, regulatory, financial, and contractual requirements. ● Watch concentration. Maintain visibility into vendor concentration, financial stability, operational dependencies, geographic exposure, subcontractor risk, and end-of-life technology. ● Guarantee resilience. Ensure critical vendors maintain business-continuity, disaster-recovery, redundancy, and service-restoration capabilities, and establish remediation, monitoring, and escalation for material risks. Business Integration, M&A & Executive Reporting ● Integrate transactions. Build a repeatable framework for assessing and rationalizing technology contracts and vendor obligations arising from acquisitions, divestitures, and business integrations; partner with Finance, Legal, Procurement, and IT Architecture to identify liabilities, integration costs, termination exposure, and consolidation opportunities. ● Advise leadership. Serve as a trusted advisor to IT leadership on vendor strategy, technology economics, sourcing alternatives, and commercial risk. ● Report on health. Report regularly on portfolio health, savings delivered, renewal pipeline, vendor performance, contractual exposure, and rationalization progress. ● Connect to value. Translate complex commercial information into clear executive recommendations connected to business value and P&L impact, positioning the VMO as a strategic enabler. Experience & Qualifications REQUIRED ● At least 12 years in IT vendor management, technology sourcing, procurement, IT finance, or contract management, including at least five years leading in a global or complex enterprise. ● Demonstrated experience establishing, transforming, or maturing a VMO or comparable technology-governance capability across multiple functions or geographies — and personally running it, not just directing it. ● Proven record of delivering measurable savings, cost avoidance, and portfolio rationalization across software, cloud, telecommunications, infrastructure, hardware, or technology services. ● Extensive experience negotiating complex enterprise technology agreements, MSAs, and SLAs at scale, with strong command of strategic sourcing, contract lifecycle management, TCO analysis, commercial benchmarking, and vendor performance management. ● Direct ownership of infrastructure vendors — networking, telecom/carrier services, compute/systems, storage, and data center/colocation — with working knowledge of those domains. ● Strong financial acumen, executive presence, and communication skills across technical and executive audiences, with experience supporting M&A activity. PREFERRED ● Experience with contract lifecycle-management platforms (e.g., Coupa) and exposure to IT Asset Management / Software Asset Management tools. ● Familiarity with Technology Business Management, FinOps, or other IT cost-transparency and optimization frameworks. ● Experience managing cloud and hybrid infrastructure vendors alongside traditional data center providers, in a global, distributed, technology-intensive, or business-services organization. ● Knowledge of telecommunications pricing, network service commercial structures, carrier agreements, and colocation markets. ● Relevant certifications (e.g., CTPRM, ITIL, PMP, CIPS) and a Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, IT, or Supply Chain; an MBA or advanced degree is preferred. What We Offer Impactful work. Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI technologies that will be game-changers for our business. Professional growth. Continuous learning and development opportunities in a dynamic, remote work environment. Competitive compensation. Attractive salary and benefits package. Collaborative environment. A supportive team culture with opportunities for occasional travel for training and industry events. #LI-JB1