Manager of Strategic Sourcing, Software and Engineering

Location: Hybrid role in Austin, TX; Madison, WI; San Francisco, CA

About the role

The Global Strategic Sourcing team helps maximize value and minimize risk through Zendesk’s vendor relationships and ensures the organization has the goods and services needed for success. As Manager of Strategic Sourcing, you will play a key role during the sourcing strategy and execution across software and engineering categories. You’ll use your innovative thinking, analytical, and negotiating skills to oversee and lead highly complex negotiations, contract review, and usage forecasting to achieve top-line growth and maximize value to the company. This role encompasses all aspects of sourcing’s responsibilities including category assessment, vendor due diligence, RFx, contract negotiations, and vendor management.

Responsibilities

• Strategic Guidance & Influence: Guide and influence business and senior leadership through key strategic projects and procurement strategy, focusing on critical vendor management, integration, and informed purchase guidance aligned to Zendesk growth and partner vision. This includes developing executive-level presentations and analysis for internal partner communications/updates.
• Forecasting & Data Alignment: Develop, maintain, and validate accurate forecasts for usage, licenses, and capacity for key contracts (e.g., AWS, Google, MongoDB, Snowflake, and others) in collaboration with Engineering, IT, and business units to gather data and identify trends or potential risks to inform contract negotiations and prevent over-commitment or unnecessary costs.
• AI/LLM Sourcing & Optimization: Lead sourcing strategy, complex negotiations, and vendor diversification for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Model (LLM) providers. Analyze and optimize AI/LLM consumption, including token usage and capacity planning, to inform contract negotiations and mitigate financial risk.
• Sourcing Execution & Cost Management: Lead end-to-end sourcing execution, including market research, RFx strategy development, and acting as an escalation point for contract negotiations partnering with Legal, Security, and IT. Support spend management projects focused on savings, process efficiency, and risk reduction, including total cost of ownership evaluations and pricing audits.
• Multi-Vendor LLM Strategy: Implement and manage a multi-vendor LLM ecosystem strategy, including coordinating sourcing for frontier labs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic), hyperscaler routes (e.g., AWS Bedrock, Gemini/Vertex), and open-weight model providers (e.g., Groq, Baseten) to ensure diversification, cost efficiency, and performance optimization.
• Commercial Leverage & Commitment Discipline: Drive commercial leverage by maintaining commitment discipline (targeting ~60% of forecasted spend) and pursuing flexible, shorter (6-12 month) renewal cycles with major LLM providers to mitigate market volatility and pricing shifts.
• AI Productivity Governance: Collaborate with Engineering and IT to manage the governance layer for internal AI productivity tooling (e.g., LibreChat, Claude Code, Gemini) to track seat vs. consumption costs and align model spend with security and legal approvals.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience sourcing for a tech or software company
• Strong software and engineering strategic negotiation skills
• Proven team player and ability to build and maintain business partnerships
• Executive-level communication and presentation skills
• Highly motivated towards achieving cost savings and operational improvement goals
• Demonstrated subject matter expertise in the functional areas of Technology, product, and engineering
• Proven success leading projects that impact multiple functional areas
• Flexibility and influence in working in a high growth, high volume environment
• Demonstrated subject matter expertise in AI infrastructure, including RAG frameworks, AI gateways, and consumption-based pricing models
• Understanding of how AI and automation are reshaping the competitive landscape for software and professional services vendors
• Proven ability to integrate commercial strategy with a technical ecosystem, specifically leveraging hyperscaler routes for negotiating better terms and model portability
• Experience negotiating with vendors offering revenue-based pricing models and managing data usage agreements that involve AI/LLM usage, such as API renewals

Pay

The US annualized base salary range for this position is $116,000.00–$174,000.00. This position may also be eligible for bonus, benefits, or related incentives. The offer for the successful candidate will be based on job-related capabilities, applicable experience, and work location.

About Zendesk

Zendesk software was built to bring a sense of calm to the chaotic world of customer service. Today we power billions of conversations with brands you know and love. Our hybrid way of working enables us to purposefully come together in person, at one of our many Zendesk offices around the world, to connect, collaborate, and learn whilst also giving our people the flexibility to work remotely for part of the week.