Director, Procurement Strategy

Toast; New York (NY); On-site; USD 186,000 - 298,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Total rewards program

Job summary

Toast in New York seeks a Director of Procurement Strategy to own the forward P2P agenda, defining multi-year roadmaps, leading high-value vendor negotiations, and driving automation and AI across the requisition-to-payment lifecycle.

You will partner with IT, Legal, and finance leaders, manage a small team, and influence senior stakeholders to translate strategy into measurable improvements that create real value for Toast and its customers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in procurement, sourcing, or finance transformation with a focus on strategy.
• Experience managing and developing people.
• Track record leading complex, high-value vendor negotiations.
• Ownership of a transformation agenda end to end: diagnosis, business case, buy-in, delivery, adoption.
• Fluency with modern P2P technolgy and AI value in this domain.
• Exceptional executive communication; ability to move senior leaders to a decision.
• Ability to drive outcomes through influence and build partnerships with non-reporting leaders.
• Comfort with ambiguity and bias toward building new capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the multi-year P2P strategy and transformation roadmap—process, policy, tooling, and category strategy.
• Build business cases for P2P investment and present to Finance leadership and SLT for decision.
• Establish operating principles, controls and policy framework for the P2P function.

Skills

Procurement strategy

Vendor negotiations

Automation & AI

Executive communication

People management

P2P technology

Job description

Toast creates technology to help restaurants and local businesses succeed in a digital world, helping business owners operate, increase sales, engage customers, and keep employees happy.

Most Procure-to-Pay teams are consumed by the work in front of them: requisitions, purchase orders, invoice exceptions, supplier issues, month-end. That work matters, and it never stops. What it doesn't leave room for is the question of where P2P should go next.

That's this role.

As Director, Procurement Strategy, you own the forward agenda for Procure-to-Pay at Toast. You'll define the multi-year roadmap, lead our most complex and highest-value vendor negotiations, drive the automation and AI agenda across the P2P lifecycle, and serve as the senior finance partner to leaders across the company on how Toast buys and pays.

You’ll lead a small team while partnering closely with the leader who runs day-to-day P2P operations. The division of labor is clean: you design, business-case, and negotiate; the operating team runs and sustains. A meaningful share of your impact will come through people who don’t report to you, so the strength of that partnership and your credibility with stakeholders matter as much as formal authority.

If you’re a procurement or finance transformation leader who has been waiting for a mandate that is genuinely about change rather than change squeezed in around the edges of execution, this is that mandate.

A Day In The Life (Responsibilities)

Set the strategy

• Define and own the multi-year P2P strategy and transformation roadmap — process, policy, tooling, and category strategy
• Build the business cases for P2P investment, including cost, risk, and return, and take them to Finance leadership and the SLT for decision
• Establish the operating principles, controls philosophy, and policy framework that the P2P function runs against

Lead the automation and AI agenda

• Define where automation, workflow tooling, and AI can materially improve cycle time, cost, control, and user experience across requisition-to-payment
• Partner with IT and Engineering to bring the right capability into the P2P environment and mobilize it against the roadmap
• Design for adoption — measure it, and iterate until the change sticks with the teams doing the work

Negotiate our most important vendor relationships

• Lead complex, high-value, and precedent-setting negotiations with Toast's top-tier strategic vendors
• Own commercial strategy for these relationships: structure, terms, leverage, benchmarking, and long-term value
• Partner with Legal on contractual risk, and with the operating team on clean handoff into ongoing supplier management

Lead and develop your team

• Manage, coach, and develop a direct report — set clear goals, give direct feedback, and create real opportunities for growth
• Build the team's capability alongside the roadmap: define what skills the function will need as the transformation agenda expands, and grow them deliberately
• Create the conditions for high-quality work — clear priorities, protected focus, and genuine ownership over meaningful problems
• Model the partnership between strategy and operations that you want the wider P2P organization to adopt

Partner Across The Company

• Serve as the senior P2P voice with the Senior Leadership Team, Finance leadership, IT/Engineering, Legal, and other senior stakeholders.
• Build the stakeholder confidence that makes transformation possible — translating operational reality into executive decisions and executive intent into workable process
• Partner with the Head of Procurement so that everything you design is operationally sound and cleanly transitioned into run-state

What Success Looks Like

• A defined go-forward procurement strategy with clear processes, policies, tools, and metrics
• Automation and AI capability adopted in practice, not just deployed
• Measurably improved commercial outcomes on Toast's strategic vendor portfolio
• A direct report who is growing, and a team shaped for the next phase of the roadmap
• Senior stakeholders who treat P2P as a strategic partner rather than a processing function

What You'll Need To Thrive (Requirements)

• 10+ years in procurement, sourcing, finance transformation, or a closely related discipline, with meaningful time spent on strategy and change rather than operations alone
• Experience managing and developing people, and a real interest in doing it well
• A track record leading complex, high-value vendor negotiations — you've sat across the table on deals that set precedent
• Demonstrated ownership of a transformation agenda end to end: diagnosis, business case, executive buy-in, delivery, and adoption
• Fluency with modern P2P/source-to-pay technology and a clear point of view on where automation and AI actually create value in this domain
• Exceptional executive communication — you can hold a room of senior leaders and move them to a decision
• Proven ability to drive outcomes through influence as well as authority, and to build a genuine partnership with an operating leader who doesn't report to you
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward building the thing that doesn't exist yet

Nice to Haves

• Experience in a high-growth technology or SaaS environment
• Background scaling a P2P function — and the team behind it — through a period of rapid company growth
• Experience working with globally distributed finance and procurement operating teams
• Public company controls and compliance experience (SOX)

AI at Toast

At Toast, one of our company values is that we're hungry to build and learn. We believe learning new AI tools empowers us to build for our customers faster, more independently, and with higher quality. We provide these tools across all disciplines, from Engineering and Product to Sales and Support, and are inspired by how our Toasters are already driving real value with them. The people who thrive here are those who embrace changes that let us build more for our customers; it’s a core part of our culture.

Our Total Rewards Philosophy

We strive to provide competitive compensation and benefits programs that help to attract, retain, and motivate the best and brightest people in our industry. Our total rewards package goes beyond great earnings potential and provides the means to a healthy lifestyle with the flexibility to meet Toasters’ changing needs. Learn more about our benefits at https://careers.toasttab.com/toast-benefits.

Zone A

$186,000—$298,000 USD

Zone B

$162,000—$259,000 USD

Zone C

$145,000—$232,000 USD

How Toast Uses AI In Its Hiring Process

Throughout the hiring process, our goal is to get to know you. We use AI tools to support our recruiters and interviewers with tasks like note-taking, summarization, and documentation of interviews to ensure they can be fully focused on your conversation. All hiring decisions are made by people. We ask that you complete interviews and assessments on your own, without real-time AI tools, recording, or transcription bots, unless we tell you otherwise in advance. To learn more: https://careers.toasttab.com/ai-in-hiring

Our Approach to Hybrid Working

We embrace a hybrid work model that fosters in-person collaboration while valuing individual needs. Our goal is to build a strong culture of connection as we work together to empower the hospitality community, regardless of location. Please visit the Locations page on our career site to learn more about our in‑office expectations by region: https://careers.toasttab.com/locations-toast

People Are the Secret Ingredient in Our Recipe for Success

At Toast, our employees are our secret ingredient—when they thrive, we thrive. The restaurant industry brings together people with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we value that same breadth at Toast. We strive to build a culture grounded in authenticity, respect, and humility, where every Toaster has a real opportunity to grow, contribute, and do their best work—raising the bar in delivering exceptional experiences for our customers and each other.

Toast is committed to creating an accessible and inclusive hiring process. As part of this commitment, we strive to provide reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities to enable them to access the hiring process. If you need an accommodation to access the job application or interview process, please contact [e-mail].

For roles in the United States, it is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.