Technology Vendor Relationship Manager

About SEEK  

At SEEK, we serve a noble purpose: to help people live more productive and fulfilling working lives and to help organisations succeed. 

By joining us, you’ll be part of a multinational technology business that is far-reaching with a start-up working culture that focuses on a set of collaborative values and appreciates dynamic cultures. SEEK is a place where potential meets possibility – it’s where your career aspiration and our purpose can make great things happen. 

Why join us?  

We’re looking for people who thrive in dynamic teams, appreciate progressive industries, and enjoy tackling regular new challenges in a large-scale, modern, and agile environment. As one of Asia Pacific’s largest tech companies, you’ll contribute to multilingual systems, solving high-impact problems to the benefit of millions of people within the region. Expect a great investment in your career development with access to workshops, conferences & courses while you work alongside seasoned experts. Be part of a fast-growing company with a strong culture and clear purpose, innovation and strong investment in responsible AI. SEEK offers you the opportunity to be involved in impactful work and be part of a great team.

The Team

The Technology Vendor Management team partners with core technology functions, such as security, engineering, infrastructure and cloud operations, to ensure appropriate controls are in place to mitigate risk and manage cost across our vendor landscape. With over 90 key vendor partnerships across APAC< we play an important governance role to maximise the value we extract from our investments, drive innovation and uplift capability and hold our vendor partners accountable to the commitments they make. We partner with service owners internally to achieve the most reliable, secure and cost effective technology ecosystem.

Key stakeholders include: 

• Senior APAC leaders and executives across Product, Delivery, and particularly the Technology Leadership Team
• Technology teams, with particular focus on nominated Technology Service Owners and key decision makers such as security, architecture and data resilience
• APAC sourcing and legal teams

About the role

The Technology Vendor Relationship Manager is responsible for the management of key Technology vendors, including the ongoing governance and relationship management between Technology Vendors and internal service owners.  This includes managing performance of key vendors, such as AWS, Salesforce, DataDog, Okta and Splunk, as well as proactively identifying opportunities for realising greater value or savings from our Vendor Relationships.

This role will sit within the APAC Technology function and will be responsible for providing essential vendor management capabilities, with key responsibilities as follows:

Responsibilities 

• Define, implement, and manage the oversight of vendor management processes such as performance scorecards, vendor tiering, risk management and performance improvement reporting, monitoring the financial viability and management stability of key third-party vendors
• Manage the Technology and Contract Management framework, which defines how Technology measures, monitors, and reports contract and vendor performance including:
  • Management of a commercial framework that meets SEEK’s needs, and provides assurance of and insight to contract and vendor performance
  • Defining the roles and responsibilities within the Technology vendor environment and managing adherence.
  • Ensuring that our vendor and contract management processes are commensurate to their risk level
  • Ensuring appropriate controls are in place to manage renewals and other commercial activities. This also extends to ensuring security, data resilience and architecture are adequately involved.
• Provide leadership and support to Technology Service Owners to:
  • Lead key Vendor Relationships to extract maximum value aligned to SEEK needs through governance and vendor performance management
  • Understand long-term business objectives and opportunities for efficiency and consolidation
  • Ensuring all technology contracts are assessed against criteria such as complexity, value, and risk, to identify those contracts/vendors that should be considered critical
  • Ensuring critical contracts are proactively and appropriately managed
  • Ensuring regular reviews of all contracts occur, to capture any changes in the criticality of contracts.
  • Be a point of escalation for vendors and TSO’s to resolve any conflict or disagreements.
  • Collaborating with team members across the APAC Technology function to build their knowledge and understanding of best practices across the vendor and contract management discipline
• Schedule and facilitate contract review events and record keeping with a focus on:
  • Facilitating meetings between internal and external parties to bring them together to run vendor risk assessments, plan for vendor performance management and develop performance metrics.
  • Ensuring a centralised review schedule is maintained and readily available
  • Ensuring actions and improvement plans are captured and acted upon
  • Ensuring vendor performance meeting are scheduled and minuted
• Monitor and report on vendors performance which includes:
  • Reviewing core Technology partnerships, reporting on Technology compliance, and establishing new vendor management plans
  • Comprehensively monitor the performance of vendors across SLAs, pricing and payment, general compliance to contract terms and conditions
  • Producing regular reporting to key stakeholders on performance and SLA’s and include analysis on reasons for successful or poor performance, in collaboration with service owners
  • Proactively identifying and raising risks and/or issues and opportunities
  • Implementing appropriate strategies and processes to ensure relationships with key suppliers deliver value-added competitive services and solutions

Essential Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated experience as a Vendor Relationship Manager in medium to large complex organisations, spanning the APAC region
• Strong commercial and operational acumen with a proven record in dealing with suppliers
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including reporting and presentation skills
• Highly developed interpersonal skills with the ability to engage with and present complex concepts and methodologies to technical and non-technical stakeholders and decision-makers at all levels
• Proven experience and strong desire to proactively explore the capabilities of new technologies
• Ability to work under pressure, independently, managing multiple stakeholders, initiatives, and tasks effectively
• Detail oriented, organised, self-motivated
• Proven experience inspiring teams to deliver outcomes

Perks and benefits 
At SEEK we offer: 

• Support of flexible working, including a mix of office and work from home days depending on your role. 
• The opportunity to work from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per financial year 
• Casual dress – every day 

At SEEK, we are passionate about fostering a culture of inclusion and wellbeing that embraces and values the diversity of our people. We are a purpose driven business that works with heart. 

We know teams with diverse ideas, experiences and perspectives are more creative and are critical to ensuring effective delivery and innovating to enable our future success. As such, we welcome applications from people with diverse backgrounds and life experiences, especially as they relate to gender, sexual identity, culture, faith, disability and life stages. If you have the skills, curiosity and an adaptable mindset but don't meet every responsibility or qualification listed in this advertisement, please still get in touch with us. 

Should you require any specific support or adjustments throughout the recruitment process and beyond, please advise us and we will be happy to assist. 

For this role, only those with eligible right to work will be considered. 

SEEK kindly requests no unsolicited resumes or approaches from recruitment agencies and will not be responsible for any associated fees.