Director – Vendor Management & Learning & Development

Shaip; Ahmedabad District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Shaip, a leading provider in AI data solutions, seeks a Director to helm five VMS and L&D functions, driving supplier capacity, governance and delivery across global projects.

You will manage a diverse network of vendors and contributors, implement scalable onboarding and training programs, and partner with Legal/InfoSec to ensure compliance and risk controls. This is a high-visibility leadership role working with US/global teams.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership of multi-function vendor/crowd operations at scale.
• Strong negotiating and governance capabilities with suppliers.
• Experience in data/AI supply chains or related workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead five VMS and L&D functions through managers and specialists.
• Publish weekly dashboards on sourcing, capacity and performance.
• Build diverse vendor network and manage community engagement and qualification controls.
• Oversee partner onboarding, price/terms, and risk assessment for external collaborations.
• Coordinate live project delivery and ensure quality and readiness of workforce.

Skills

Leadership

Vendor governance

Operations management

Strategic planning

Job description

Shaip by Ubiquity seeks a Director to lead five functions: VMS Live Projects, VMS Community, VMS Crowd, VMS Strategic Partnerships, and Learning & Development (L&D). This is a supply-side operations leadership role responsible for building reliable global contributor and partner capacity, delivering vendor-side commitments, controlling supplier economics, and ensuring the workforce is qualified and production-ready. This Director is a peer of the leaders responsible for core delivery, Physical AI delivery, and Pre-Sales & Solutioning.

Functional leadership and governance

• Lead the five VMS and L&D functions through their managers and specialists; set clear ownership, budgets, operating rhythms, development plans and succession coverage.
• Publish weekly dashboards for sourcing pipeline, verified capacity, fill rate, activation, training readiness, vendor performance, risk and spend.

Global sourcing, community and crowd

• Build a geographically and linguistically diverse network of qualified vendors, field partners, freelancers, experts and contributors aligned to forecast demand.
• Own community growth, contributor engagement and retention, recruitment funnels, identity/eligibility controls, incentives, geographic quotas and hard-to-source cohorts.
• Maintain accurate, evidence-backed supply and surge-capacity forecasts; diversify concentration and develop contingency suppliers.

Strategic partnerships and vendor economics

• Identify, diligence, negotiate and onboard partners; coordinate legal, procurement and InfoSec review of rights, consent, security and subcontractor requirements.
• Manage rate cards, effective cost per accepted unit, recruitment/acquisition costs, payment terms, partner scorecards, capacity commitments and performance improvement plans.
• Provide validated vendor rates, throughput, availability and risk assumptions to Pre-Sales; flag nonviable commitments before external quotations are approved.

VMS live projects and delivery coordination

• Own supplier-side staffing, mobilization, allocations, vendor SLAs, issue escalation and recovery during live programs, partnering with Vivek and Darshan for overall customer delivery.
• Monitor submission/acceptance yield, rejection and rework by vendor; resolve systemic issues and maintain fallback plans.

Learning and Development

• Build role-based onboarding, qualification tests, guideline training, calibration, recertification and remediation for contributors, reviewers and partners.
• Tie training capacity and pass rates to project ramp plans and quality outcomes; partner with Delivery/QA on measurable readiness gates.

Risk and operational improvement

• Maintain audit-ready records for contributor consent, data provenance, vendor agreements, compliant worker engagement and access controls in partnership with Legal/InfoSec.
• Improve onboarding cycle time, workforce activation, sourcing automation, forecasting accuracy and quality-adjusted unit cost without compromising fairness or compliance.

Candidate profile

• Proven leadership of managers and multi-function vendor/crowd or distributed workforce operations; quantified scale of people, countries, partners and spend.
• Direct exposure to data collection, annotation, GenAI data, speech/audio, CV, healthcare or physical AI supply chains; ability to learn adjacent service lines.
• Strong negotiating skills, vendor governance, workforce capacity planning and cost/yield analytics.
• Experience building repeatable training, qualification and certification processes, or close operating responsibility for them.
• Comfort working with US/global teams and managing risks, operational metrics and senior escalations.

Measures of success

Verified capacity coverage and fill rate time to source/activate qualified contributor and vendor supply training-to production pass rate cost per accepted unit and supplier savings vendor SLA/acceptance performance diversity and continuity of supply post-launch staffing variances compliance and audit readiness.