Draken on cord

Draken

Strategic Procurement Manager

External position
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Security · Transport
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Posted
a month ago
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2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Operations
Experience level: Mid, Senior, Lead
Core skills considered: Stakeholder Management, Process management
Other skills considered: Project Management, Excel

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: On-site
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Strategic Procurement Manager to play a pivotal role in shaping and delivering procurement strategies across our programmes and bid activities. This is an exciting opportunity for a commercially minded procurement professional to influence major projects, drive supplier performance, and contribute to strategic business growth.

As Strategic Procurement Manager, you will provide proactive procurement leadership from bid and proposal stages through to contract award and in-service support. Working closely with Programme, Technology, Engineering, and Commercial teams, you will ensure robust, compliant, and cost-effective supply solutions that support programme delivery and organisational objectives.

You will be responsible for managing key supplier relationships, leading high-value commercial negotiations, mitigating supply chain risk, and driving continuous improvement across procurement activities.


Key Responsibilities

  • Develop and implement procurement strategies aligned to business objectives and programme requirements.
  • Analyse market conditions, supplier landscapes, and industry trends to identify opportunities and mitigate risks.
  • Support strategic decision-making through make-versus-buy assessments and commercial evaluations.
  • Lead procurement activities for major bids and programmes, ensuring timely and competitive submissions.
  • Provide procurement input throughout the programme lifecycle, including bid/no-bid decisions and engineering reviews.
  • Support programme milestones while balancing cost, quality, risk, and schedule considerations.
  • Build and maintain strong relationships with key suppliers and subcontractors.
  • Lead tendering activities, supplier selection processes, and contract negotiations.
  • Manage supplier performance through agreed KPIs, driving continuous improvement and supply chain resilience.
  • Ensure contracts effectively manage commercial risks and deliver value to the business.
  • Ensure procurement activities comply with company policies, legal requirements, export control regulations, and ethical sourcing standards.
  • Identify and mitigate commercial and supply chain risks.
  • Maintain governance, documentation, and procurement compliance throughout all procurement activities.
  • Capture and report savings and cost avoidance opportunities in line with agreed methodologies.

About You

We're looking for an experienced procurement professional with a strong background in manufacturing, engineering, aerospace, defence, or other technically complex environments.

You will have:

  • Proven experience developing and delivering procurement strategies within complex operational or manufacturing environments.
  • Strong commercial acumen with the ability to balance cost, quality, risk, and delivery requirements.
  • Experience leading complex commercial and contractual negotiations.
  • Strong contract management skills, including drafting, reviewing, and negotiating agreements.
  • Knowledge of intellectual property considerations within commercial contracts.
  • Experience managing supplier relationships, supplier performance, and strategic sourcing activities.
  • Strong analytical capabilities with experience using ERP systems and supplier intelligence tools.
  • Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills.
  • Strong communication and presentation abilities.
  • A thorough understanding of procurement governance, compliance, and best practice.
  • A proactive, solutions-focused approach with a passion for continuous improvement.

Desirable Qualifications

  • Professional procurement qualification such as CIPS (or working towards).
  • Experience within defence, aerospace, engineering, or highly regulated industries.
  • Knowledge of supplier intelligence platforms such as JOSCAR.

What You'll Bring

  • Strategic thinking and commercial leadership.
  • Exceptional negotiation and relationship-building skills.
  • The ability to work collaboratively across multiple business functions.
  • A focus on delivering measurable business value and procurement excellence.
  • A willingness to travel within the UK and internationally to visit suppliers, attend industry events, and support programme activities.

Company Benefits

  • As such, we offer competitive salaries and a comprehensive benefits package
  • Including up to 12% matching pension contributions
  • Bonus incentives
  • Discounted PMI
  • Electric car scheme
  • Tech vouchers
  • Wellbeing programmes and much more.
  • Strategic Procurement Manager at Draken
    Position posted a month ago

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    Starling Bank on cord

    Starling Bank

    Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

    London, UK
    FinTech · Banking · Finance
    A better bank for everyone
    Active
    over 6 months ago
    Responds to
    0% of requests
    Responds in
    1h 55m
    Requests
    7 pending

    Skills & Experience

    Job roles: Full Stack
    Experience level: Mid, Senior
    Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

    Logistics

    Base salary: £70K - £110K
    Employment type: Permanent
    Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
    Visa sponsorship: Not available

    Job Description

    Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

    Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

    We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

    Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

    The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

    Hybrid Working

    We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

    Our Data Environment

    Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

    We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

    Requirements

    We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

    We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

    • Design REST apis.
    • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
    • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
    • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
    • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
    • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
    • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

    Company Benefits

    • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
    • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
    • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
    • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
    • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
    • Life insurance at 4x your salary
    • Hybrid/remote working
    • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
    • Generous family-friendly policies
    • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
    • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
    • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

    Full details are available on our careers site

    Interview Process

    Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

    • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
    • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
    • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
    • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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