Vendor Manager

Role Profile

About Radiant

Radiant is redefining how AI infrastructure is built.

We design and operate AI-native cloud platforms engineered for sovereignty, performance, and scale. Our infrastructure powers GPU-native workloads, multi-tenant control planes, and high-performance AI systems designed for the most demanding environments.

We are not building a generic cloud. We are building purpose-built AI infrastructure - from powered land, to compute, to software .

As we scale our platform and expand our engineering organisation, we are looking for leaders who can build strong teams, uphold high standards, and deliver reliably at pace.

About the Infrastructure Team

The Infrastructure Team spearheads the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of critical HPC/AI infrastructure to the broader Technology and Customer organizations. Its mission is to deploy scalable, secure, and efficient infrastructure solutions tailored to the organization's strategic needs. The team defines Radiant's supercomputers' reference architecture in line with the customer, software, and operational requirements of the company.

They work closely with third-party suppliers to provide and maintain the list of technologies that form part of Radiant's portfolio of offerings. Because that portfolio is built almost entirely on external capacity — GPU cloud providers, OEMs, colocation and datacenter partners, networking and storage vendors — the strength of Radiant's supplier relationships is inseparable from the strength of its platform.

Vendor management sits at the centre of that. The Vendor Manager owns how suppliers enter Radiant's ecosystem, what commercial terms we hold them to, and whether they perform against those terms once deployed. They partner with the broader Radiant team to turn a fragmented supplier base into a governed, tiered portfolio the delivery teams can rely on.

What you’ll do

• Own the vendor onboarding process end to end, taking new suppliers through a tiered model that matches the depth of diligence to the depth of the relationship:

  • Known vendor: transactional suppliers. Entity and sanctions screening, financial viability, security questionnaire, standard terms, payment setup.

  • Partner: recurring or material spend. Deeper due diligence, named commercial and technical owners on both sides, negotiated terms, defined SLAs, and an agreed review cadence.

  • Strategic partner: suppliers Radiant depends on for capacity, continuity, or roadmap. Executive sponsorship, joint QBRs, capacity and roadmap alignment, exit and continuity planning, and concentration-risk review.

• Run intake triage for new supplier requests: assign the right tier, drive the diligence to completion, and keep the pipeline moving so delivery teams are not blocked waiting on process.

• Maintain a single source of truth for every infrastructure and compute contract — terms, renewal and notice dates, committed spend, reserved capacity, price escalators, and termination rights.

• Run renewals on a forward calendar rather than as a fire drill, flagging every material renewal ahead of its notice window with a recommendation to renew, renegotiate, or exit, backed by usage data.

• Ensure compliance requirements flow into commercial terms before and during negotiations

• Track consumption against commitments and flag under-utilised reservations or approaching overage before they hit the budget, feeding real usage patterns back into the next negotiation.

• Define and report the KPIs and SLAs that matter, such as allocation against reservation, incident frequency, provisioning lead times, support responsiveness, and invoice accuracy.

• Run the vendor review cadence: monthly or quarterly reviews for partners, and QBRs with executive attendance for strategic partners.

• Own escalation and remediation when a vendor underperforms — raise it, document it, agree a corrective action plan, and pursue service credits where they are earned.

• Establish vendor incident notification requirements & playbooks (timeframe, escalation, documentation) for breach response and incident communication.

• Maintain a vendor scorecard that Infrastructure leadership can read in five minutes and take to the executive team.

• Own third-party risk assessment and periodic re-assessment across security, data protection, financial, and geographic or concentration risk, in partnership with Security and Legal.

• Keep certifications, insurance, and data-protection documentation current (SOC 2, ISO 27001, DPAs, sub-processor disclosures), and support internal and customer audits with clean, retrievable vendor records.

• Maintain continuity and exit plans for single-source dependencies, so that for any critical supplier Radiant knows what the fallback is and roughly what switching would cost in time and money.

• Support the establishment of vendor management best practices and continuously improve the process, templates, and documentation through the participation of "lessons learned" workshops.

Requirements

• BSc in Business, Supply Chain, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 5+ years in vendor management, IT procurement, strategic sourcing, or supplier operations, with meaningful time spent on technology and infrastructure categories.

• Demonstrated experience managing infrastructure and compute suppliers, such as GPU providers, OEMs, networking or storage vendors.

• Proven track record negotiating and managing complex technology contracts, including MSAs, SOWs, DPAs, SLAs, and multi-year committed-spend agreements.

• Fluency with the commercial mechanics of compute: committed use and reserved capacity, rate cards, burst and overage pricing, egress and transfer costs, SLA credit structures, renewal escalators, and liability caps.

• Sufficient technical literacy to hold a credible conversation with infrastructure engineers about GPU, networking, and storage, and to distinguish a genuine capacity constraint from a negotiating position.

• Experience designing and operating vendor governance frameworks — tiering, onboarding, due diligence, performance scorecards, and third-party risk assessment.

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with a track record interfacing with various types of stakeholders (engineering/operations teams, vendors, legal, finance) and writing clear deliverables.

• Comfortable working in fast-moving, high-complexity technical environments, and building process where none currently exists.

Nice to have

• Prior work experience in HPC, hyperscale, Telco, or AI infrastructure environments involving large-scale compute procurement.

• Working knowledge of the GPU and AI hardware vendor landscape (NVIDIA and its OEM channel, alternative accelerator vendors, neocloud providers) and how their allocation models and roadmaps work in practice.

• Understanding of datacenter commercial models, including colocation agreements, power contracts, and capacity reservation structures.

• Familiarity with vendor management or contract lifecycle management (CLM) tooling, and with procurement workflows in ERP systems.

• Exposure to export controls, sanctions screening, or hardware supply-chain constraints affecting GPU and networking availability.

• Experience supporting SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits from the third-party risk side.

• A professional procurement or contract management qualification (CIPS, WorldCC, or equivalent).

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