Strategic Sourcing Director

Microsoft Cloud Operations and Innovation (CO+I) is the team behind the cloud. We are responsible for delivering over 200 Microsoft web portals, Live and Online Services around the world including infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability. Our focus is on smart growth, high efficiency, and delivering a trusted experience to customers and partners worldwide. We are looking for a passionate, high energy individual to help build the network that powers the world’s largest online services.

Within CO+I, the strategic Supply Chain team is responsible for establishing a supply chain that can meet the ever-growing growth of the Cloud and our customers. We support a portfolio of complex, multi-disciplinary, multi-billion, multi-year datacenter construction and lease projects. Furthermore, we support the Operations team that manages and runs the cloud assets.

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.

**Responsibilities**:
**Responsibilities**

Sourcing
- Manages the development and execution of multi-year Data Center sourcing strategies for several complex, strategic projects and/or purchasing opportunities, optimizing costs and ensuring continuity of supply and/or services to enable business strategy. Leads cross-functional engagements with Construction, Engineering and shares best practices, drives alignment in sourcing and takes procurement decisions benchmarking with industry experts to inform strategy with a global view. Directs team(s) to leverage personal expertise and benchmark data to identify and revise business requirements, manage conflicting priorities and tradeoffs, and resolve escalations to execute on sourcing strategies and solutions.
- Leads the integration of business specifications and sourcing strategies into supplier selection processes for several complex purchasing areas. Accountable for defining and driving strategies and priorities for process management, consistency, and outcomes at scale, as well as developing improvement plans, sharing delivery best practices, identifying insights and root causes of issues across procurement and buying processes, and focusing teams on opportunities to enhance partner experience and/or operational processes. Manages partnership with suppliers to drive innovation and improvement, transform capabilities, and proactively assesses risk and the impact of change.
- Leads cross-functional contract and price negotiation activities for one or more purchasing categories to ensure contracts reflect Microsoft’s cross-functional engagements with suppliers. Identifies systematic and long-term cost reduction opportunities to drive supplier cost competitiveness across purchasing categories and leads efforts to realize those opportunities cross-functionally.

Compliance
- Partners with stakeholders and suppliers to identify business threats and determine which sustainable elements, alternative solutions, and/or policy changes would optimally mitigate risks moving forward. Drives policy change as needed, as well as the systematic resolution and remediation of surfaced issues with suppliers and/or partners.

Procurement and Contracts
- Provides high-level negotiation and sets standards across organizations. Addresses escalations related to pricing and category management issues, and proactively evaluates and drives changes in processes 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 and control processes for consistency, accuracy, and timeliness across one or more purchasing categories. Shares best practices on established methodologies, monitors outcomes, serves as a point of escalation on contract delivery issues, and delivers internal and external executive-level briefings detailing current and projected sourcing contract execution models, anticipated risks, and contingency plans. Monitors the impact of change orders to the underlying business case and partners cross-functionally to adjust impact models.

Stakeholder Collaboration
- Oversees or leads pricing and negotiation strategies for several complex Data Center purchasing categories, develops a business group for optimal cross-functional stakeholder support and business assurance, and fosters cross-functional partnerships to negotiate strategic decisions and produce deliverables. Drives consensus in the goals and success criteria with stakeholders both internal and external to Microsoft, is recognized as a key negotiator and collaborator, and coaches senior sourcing staff on negotiation and collaboration best practices.
- Defines and executes on stra