PAE Senior Buyer

About the role

We are seeking a Senior Buyer to serve as the lead purchasing professional within the Purchasing Department, providing daily guidance, mentoring, and technical support to the buying team while partnering closely with the Purchasing Manager. This role is responsible for ensuring the timely procurement of electronic components, bare printed circuit boards (PCB fabrication), custom mechanical components, customer-specific parts, fabricated assemblies, and outside services required to support customer production schedules. The Senior Buyer is expected to lead by example, develop best practices, improve purchasing processes, build strong supplier relationships, and ensure material availability while balancing inventory, cost, quality, and delivery performance.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership: Serve as the lead buyer and primary mentor for the purchasing team; provide daily guidance, coaching, and training to buyers; support onboarding and development of new buyers; promote purchasing best practices and standardized procedures; act as the Purchasing Manager’s delegate during periods of absence.
• Purchasing & Planning: Procure electronic components, PCB fabrication, assemblies, mechanical components, and outside processing services; review MRP recommendations and make purchasing decisions based on demand, supplier performance, lead times, and inventory strategy; analyze material requirements and consolidate demand where appropriate to optimize purchasing efficiencies; monitor supplier acknowledgments and ensure purchase orders support customer production schedules; manage purchase order placement, confirmations, revisions, and cancellations; expedite critical materials to prevent production shortages; resolve material shortages and proactively identify supply chain risks.
• Supplier Management: Develop and maintain strategic supplier relationships; evaluate supplier performance (on-time delivery, quality, responsiveness, cost competitiveness); lead supplier business reviews and continuous improvement initiatives; negotiate pricing, payment terms, lead times, and long-term supply agreements; identify and qualify alternate suppliers to reduce supply chain risk; support supplier corrective actions with Supplier Quality.
• Inventory Management: Balance inventory investment with customer service requirements; monitor excess, obsolete, and slow-moving inventory; recommend inventory reduction strategies while maintaining material availability; review safety stock recommendations and supplier stocking programs; support cycle count investigations and inventory accuracy initiatives.
• Cross Functional: Collaborate across departments to align purchasing activities with production and engineering needs.