Location: Boston, MA or New York, NY
Work Arrangement: Hybrid - 2-3 days onsite per week
Duration: 6 months, with likely extension to 12 months
Contract-to-Hire: Possible
About the Role
Our financial services client is seeking a Senior Contract Manager to join its Global Investment Solutions (GIS) Strategy & Execution organization. This team manages the commercial relationships with third-party service providers supporting a large investment operations platform.
You will own the drafting, review, negotiation, execution, renewal, and ongoing management of commercial agreements across investment operations, data, technology, fund administration, managed services, consulting, and staff augmentation.
This is a hands-on role for someone who understands the operational environment of an investment manager, fund administrator, insurance investment organization, or similar financial services business and can independently manage multiple agreements and negotiations in a fast-paced environment.
What You'll Do
- Draft, review, negotiate, and manage third-party commercial agreements, including MSAs, SOWs, SLAs, order forms, amendments, information security schedules, and data privacy agreements.
- Negotiate directly with vendor commercial and legal contacts on key terms including liability, indemnification, data handling, termination rights, service credits, and pricing.
- Partner with business owners to translate contractual requirements, obligations, and risks into clear, practical business language.
- Work closely with Procurement, Legal, Third Party Risk Management, Information Security, and Data Privacy to move agreements through the required review and approval process.
- Manage both new contracts and renewals, maintaining a forward-looking negotiation and renewal calendar.
- Investigate and resolve service disputes, scope disagreements, service-credit claims, and invoicing discrepancies.
- Maintain accurate contract records, amendments, renewal dates, termination rights, spend commitments, and other key contractual milestones.
- Monitor vendor consumption against contractual entitlements, including software licenses, data feeds, redistribution rights, user counts, API/query volumes, and tiered or consumption-based pricing.
- Identify upcoming entitlement or pricing thresholds and provide recommendations to business owners regarding additional purchases, reallocations, or reductions.
- Prepare negotiation positions and options for upcoming renewals and brief business owners and vendor management leadership.
- Manage contracts against operational deadlines supporting live investment activities, data migrations, NAV processes, and investment closes.
Required Qualifications
- 5-7 years of experience in commercial contract management, procurement, or contracts-focused legal work.
- Direct experience owning and negotiating MSAs, SOWs, SLAs, information security terms, and data privacy/data processing agreements.
- Experience within an investment manager, alternatives manager, fund administrator, insurance investment organization, or comparable financial services environment.
- Strong third-party vendor negotiation experience, particularly around liability, indemnification, data handling, termination, service levels, and service credits.
- Strong understanding of how investment operations and investment platforms function.
- Excellent stakeholder management skills with the ability to work simultaneously with business owners, Legal, Procurement, Risk, Information Security, and vendors.
- Strong organizational skills with demonstrated ability to manage a portfolio of concurrent agreements and competing deadlines.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex contractual issues to non-legal stakeholders.
- Experience using contract lifecycle management (CLM) platforms and contract repositories.
- Ability to adapt to evolving requirements related to data privacy, information security, and third-party risk.
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Legal Studies, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Preferred Experience
- Fund administration and accounting agreements.
- Loan servicing or agency services agreements.
- Market and reference data licensing.
- Order management and portfolio systems.
- Professional services and staff augmentation agreements.
- Software licensing and subscription models, including seat-based, enterprise, tiered, and consumption-based pricing.
- Market data entitlement and redistribution terms.
- Financial-services regulatory, outsourcing, and operational resilience requirements.
- Contracting with offshore or nearshore service providers.
Why Join?
This is an opportunity to work at the intersection of investment operations, vendor management, technology, procurement, and commercial contracting. You will have direct ownership of high-value agreements supporting critical investment services while partnering with senior stakeholders across the organization.
If you are a contract professional who understands financial services and enjoys negotiation, vendor management, stakeholder engagement, and solving complex commercial issues, this role offers the opportunity to make an immediate impact.