Founding Procurement Lead, Customer Outcomes

Negotiateai Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Aron, backed by Menlo Ventures, is building an AI chief of staff for procurement. The Founding Procurement Lead will own critical customer relationships and the procurement work inside them, sitting between customers and our engineering team to push improvements and ensure outcomes.

You will translate learnings into product requirements, partner with engineers, and drive initiatives that deliver measurable savings and value for enterprise procurement teams.

Qualifications

• 5-10+ years in procurement, strategic sourcing, category management, or procurement transformation.
• Owned meaningful spend and run competitive sourcing events.
• Experience in manufacturing or industrial environments is valuable.
• Exceptional procurement capabilities and ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own customer implementations and ongoing success.
• Understand customer spend, suppliers, categories, constraints, and priorities.
• Identify high-value work Aron should take on and drive opportunities from data to sourcing.
• Build credibility with CPOs, finance leaders, and plant stakeholders.
• Track value from identified opportunity through realized savings.
• Represent customers as an extension of their procurement organization between customers and engineering.

Skills

Procurement

Strategic sourcing

Category management

Procurement transformation

Job description

Founding Procurement Lead, Customer Outcomes

San Francisco Bay Area | Full-time | In person

Build the future of procurement with us

Aron is building an AI chief of staff for procurement.

Procurement teams are responsible for enormous amounts of spend, but much of the work that could create value never gets done. Categories go years without being competitively sourced. Supplier negotiations get deferred. Savings opportunities sit buried across invoices, contracts, emails, and ERP systems.

We’re building Aron to change that.

Aron works alongside procurement teams to understand their spend, identify opportunities, run sourcing work, engage suppliers, and turn fragmented information into commercial decisions.

We’re backed by Menlo Ventures and Storm Ventures and work with customers ranging from mid-market manufacturers to some of the world’s largest enterprises.

We’re looking for an exceptional procurement operator to join the founding team.

Your mandate

Make Aron indispensable to our customers, then help us turn what you learn into product.

This is not a traditional Customer Success role.

You will own some of Aron’s most important customer relationships and the procurement work happening inside them.

You’ll sit directly between our customers and our engineering team.

When Aron works, you’ll push it further.

When Aron gets something wrong, you’ll understand why.

When the product cannot complete the work yet, you’ll get the job done, then work with engineering so a human doesn’t need to do it the next time.

You’ll have significant influence over what we build.

What you’ll own

Customer outcomes

You’ll become a trusted partner to procurement leaders at major industrial companies.

You will:

• Own customer implementations and ongoing success

• Understand each customer’s spend, suppliers, categories, constraints, and procurement priorities

• Identify the highest-value work Aron should take on

• Drive opportunities from raw data through sourcing and commercial decision

• Build credibility with CPOs, category managers, finance leaders, and plant-level stakeholders

• Track value rigorously from identified opportunity through realized savings

• Identify opportunities to expand Aron’s role inside each customer

Your customers should view you as an extension of their procurement organization, not their software vendor.

Procurement execution

You’ll do real procurement work.

That can mean:

• Diving into millions of dollars of messy spend

• Determining whether two seemingly identical parts are actually comparable

• Building and launching an RFQ

• Finding additional suppliers

• Challenging an incumbent’s pricing

• Calling or emailing a supplier to get a bid moving

• Normalizing quotes with different units, specifications, freight, payment terms, and MOQs

• Running another negotiation round

• Evaluating commercial and supply-risk tradeoffs

• Preparing an award recommendation

• Determining whether negotiated savings actually reached the P&L

You should be able to look at a sourcing recommendation and know when something doesn’t smell right.

Product development

You’ll have a front-row seat to where AI succeeds and fails in real procurement work.

We expect you to turn that into product.

You’ll work directly with our engineers to:

• Identify where Aron requires human intervention

• Reproduce and diagnose workflow failures

• Define what an excellent procurement outcome should look like

• QA AI-generated recommendations

• Translate recurring customer problems into product requirements

• Help determine what Aron should automate next

• Design workflows that work across customers rather than for a single account

• Help Aron capture the context and commercial judgment that should matter the next time it performs the work

One of the most important questions you’ll ask is:

“Why did I have to do this manually, and how do we make sure I never have to do it again?”

Who we’re looking for

You’ve spent roughly 5-10+ years in procurement, strategic sourcing, category management, or procurement transformation and have been exceptionally good at it.

You’ve personally owned meaningful spend.

You’ve run competitive sourcing events.

You’ve negotiated with suppliers.

You’ve had to defend a sourcing recommendation to senior leadership.

You’ve dealt with terrible ERP data, incomplete specifications, difficult stakeholders, incumbent suppliers, and savings targets that still had to be delivered.

Experience in manufacturing or industrial environments is particularly valuable.

You might come from companies such as Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Applied Materials, Honeywell, Danaher, Rockwell Automation, Flex, Jabil, or another world-class procurement organization.

But pedigree alone doesn’t matter.

We care much more about whether you are an exceptional operator.

You might be a fit if

You are the person people give the difficult category to.

You can go from a CPO conversation to a 20,000-line spreadsheet without losing energy.

You are commercially aggressive without being reckless.

You notice when a quote is using the wrong unit before anyone else does.

You don’t accept “the data is bad” as the end of an analysis.

You can build trust with a supplier without becoming afraid to negotiate with them.

You communicate complicated commercial decisions simply.

You are extremely detail-oriented but know when 80% is enough to move forward.

You don’t need a playbook for every situation.

You have high standards and low ego.

You are curious about technology and want to understand what AI can genuinely do rather than simply talk about it.

Most importantly, you take ownership.

When something isn’t working, your first instinct is to figure out how to fix it.

This role probably isn’t for you if

You want a traditional Customer Success job.

You primarily want to manage relationships rather than own outcomes.

You want engineering to figure out the product while you relay customer requests.

You haven’t personally run sourcing or negotiation work.

You need clean data before you can make progress.

You prefer clearly defined responsibilities and mature processes.

You want to join a company where everything has already been figured out.

It hasn’t.

Your first 90 days

By the end of your first three months:

• You independently owned several important customer relationships

• Those customers trust your procurement judgment

• You can take a sourcing opportunity through an approval-ready recommendation without the founder

• You have personally identified product failures and helped engineering eliminate them

• You can explain exactly where humans are still required in Aron’s workflows and why

• Customer implementations are getting faster

• We are measuring customer value more rigorously

• The founder is no longer required to personally rescue day-to-day procurement work

Why this role matters

We’re not looking for someone to operate Customer Success as it exists today.

We’re looking for someone to help invent what Customer Success looks like when the software itself is becoming part of the procurement team.

Today, you may perform part of the work yourself.

Tomorrow, Aron should perform it.

Your job is to make that transition happen without compromising the quality of the outcome.

If you’ve spent years becoming exceptional at procurement and want to use that experience to help build the product that changes how the function operates, we’d like to meet you.