Head of Procurement

ABOUT US:

Fireworks is the platform for specialized intelligence, enabling companies to build, train, and serve AI models tailored to their own data, workflows, and products. Founded by the team behind PyTorch and backed by AMD, Atreides, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and TCV, Fireworks powers production AI with hundreds of state-of-the-art open models across text, image, embedding, audio, and multimodal workloads. Today, Fireworks is a Series D company valued at $17.5 billion, bringing together an ambitious, collaborative team that's building the future of enterprise AI.

ROLE OVERVIEW

We are seeking an experienced and commercially minded Head of Procurement to lead our procurement function and shape the company’s sourcing, supplier management, and purchasing strategy.

This role will be responsible for building a high-performing procurement organization that delivers measurable cost efficiencies, improves supplier performance, strengthens commercial discipline, and reduces supply and operational risk. The Head of Procurement will partner closely with business leaders across Finance, Operations, Legal, Technology, and other functions to ensure procurement supports both near-term business needs and long-term company objectives.

The ideal candidate combines strategic thinking with strong execution, commercial negotiation expertise, stakeholder management skills, and the ability to build scalable procurement processes in a growing organization.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

PROCUREMENT STRATEGY & LEADERSHIP

- Develop and execute the company-wide procurement strategy aligned with business and financial objectives.

- Establish procurement policies, operating models, governance, and approval frameworks.

- Build procurement into a strategic business partner rather than a transactional purchasing function.

- Identify and prioritize opportunities for cost optimization, supplier consolidation, process improvement, and risk reduction.

- Provide leadership and coaching to the procurement team and build organizational capability as the function grows.

STRATEGIC SOURCING & COMMERCIAL MANAGEMENT

- Lead strategic sourcing initiatives across key spend categories.

- Develop category strategies based on spend analysis, market intelligence, supplier capabilities, and business requirements.

- Lead or support high-value and complex commercial negotiations.

- Drive competitive sourcing processes including RFPs, RFQs, supplier evaluations, and contract negotiations.

- Establish commercial benchmarks and ensure the organization receives competitive pricing, terms, and service levels.

- Partner with Legal and Finance to improve contract structures, payment terms, renewal management, and commercial protections.

SUPPLIER MANAGEMENT

- Develop a structured supplier relationship management program for strategic and critical suppliers.

- Establish supplier performance metrics, scorecards, business reviews, and improvement plans.

- Identify supplier concentration, continuity, compliance, financial, geopolitical, and operational risks.

- Develop mitigation strategies and alternative sourcing options for critical suppliers.

- Build strategic relationships with key suppliers to support innovation, service improvement, and long-term value creation.

SPEND MANAGEMENT & VALUE CREATION

- Create visibility into company-wide third-party spend and identify opportunities to improve purchasing effectiveness.

- Establish savings methodologies and reporting in partnership with Finance.

- Deliver measurable cost savings, cost avoidance, working capital improvements, and total cost-of-ownership benefits.

- Improve demand management and challenge unnecessary or inefficient expenditure where appropriate.

- Track procurement performance against agreed KPIs and communicate results to senior leadership.

PROCUREMENT OPERATIONS & PROCESS

- Design scalable procure-to-pay and source-to-contract proc …