Purchasing Manager
Wayve · Sunnyvale, California
Before the detail, here's the challenge you'd help us solve.
We build the embodied intelligence that moves real vehicles safely, and the ecosystem a billion machines will run on in the future. Very few people in AI can say this. Every role here, whatever the team, plugs into that.
Here’s what this particular role covers.
PURCHASING MANAGER
🛠️ About our Purchasing Team
Wayve’s Purchasing team helps the business scale by ensuring we have the right suppliers, commercial agreements, and procurement processes in place to support our global operations.
As an Indirect Purchasing Manager, you’ll help shape how Wayve sources, manages, and optimizes indirect spend across areas including IT/SaaS, Marketing, People/HR, Facilities, and Security. You’ll work closely with teams across the business to identify the right suppliers, negotiate strong commercial terms, manage risk, and ensure our supplier relationships continue to deliver value as Wayve grows.
This is an opportunity to have a direct impact on how we build a scalable, efficient, and commercially strong procurement function in a fast-moving global environment.
🧠 Your day-to-day
You’ll own procurement activities across a broad range of indirect categories, partnering with internal stakeholders to understand their requirements and develop sourcing strategies that balance cost, quality, service, and risk.
You’ll manage the end-to-end supplier and contract lifecycle — from identifying and evaluating suppliers through negotiation, contracting, onboarding, performance management, renewal, and escalation.
You’ll work closely with Legal, Finance, HR/People, IT, Security, Facilities, and Marketing to ensure purchasing decisions align with business priorities and company policies. You’ll also help improve procurement processes, strengthen supplier governance, and use spend and performance data to identify opportunities for savings and greater efficiency.
🧩 What you’ll be working on:
- Developing and executing indirect procurement and sourcing strategies aligned with business priorities and cost-efficiency targets.
- Managing sourcing activities across categories including IT/SaaS, Marketing, People/HR services, Facilities, Security, and other corporate services.
- Leading supplier identification, evaluation, competitive sourcing, and commercial negotiations.
- Owning supplier contracts from initial negotiation and drafting through execution, renewal, and ongoing compliance management.
- Negotiating and managing commercial agreements including MSAs, SOWs, NDAs, order forms, and supplier terms, in partnership with Legal.
- Building and maintaining strong relationships with global suppliers and monitoring performance, service quality, risk, and compliance.
- Managing contract renewals and identifying opportunities to improve commercial terms, consolidate suppliers, or reduce unnecessary spend.
- Acting as the key point of contact between suppliers and internal stakeholders for commercial issues, escalations, and performance concerns.
- Analyzing spend data, supplier KPIs, market trends, and commercial benchmarks to support sourcing decisions.
- Supporting budget planning and forecasting across indirect spend categories.
- Implementing and improving procurement best practices, including supplier scorecards, spend tracking, contract lifecycle management, and governance.
- Ensuring procurement activities comply with internal policies, ethical sourcing standards, and risk-management requirements.
🙌 You should apply if:
- You have 5+ years of experience in procurement, strategic sourcing, supplier management, or a related purchasing role.
- You have experience managing indirect spend categories, ideally including IT/SaaS, Marketing, Facilities, People/HR services, Security, or other corporate services.
- You have strong end-to-end supplier contract management experience, including negotiation, contract review, execution, renewals, and ongoing vendor management.
- You understand global procurement practices, supplier governance, compliance, and third-party risk management.
- You have experience partnering closely with Legal, Finance, HR, IT, Security, and other business stakeholders in a matrixed or global organization.
- You are a confident commercial negotiator who can balance cost, quality, business requirements, and supplier risk.
- You have strong communication and stakeholder-management skills and are comfortable influencing across different functions and levels of seniority.
- You are analytical and comfortable using spend data, supplier performance metrics, benchmarks, and KPIs to make informed decisions.
- You are highly organized and able to manage multiple sourcing initiatives, contracts, renewals, and supplier relationships at the same time.
- You are comfortable operating in a fast-paced, dynamic environment where priorities can change quickly.
- Experience with procurement or contract-management platforms such as SAP Ariba, Coupa, Ivalua, Oracle Procurement Cloud, or similar tools would be beneficial.
Annual Base Salary Range: $150,400 - $172,950 USD
This is a full-time role based in our office in Sunnyvale. At Wayve, we operate a hybrid working policy that combines time together in our offices and workshops to fuel innovation, culture, relationships and learning, with focused time working from home.
🌱 Not ticking every box? That’s totally okay! If you’re passionate about autonomy and keen to learn, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every requirement.
More about Wayve:
🚀 Wayve is building the leading AI platform for autonomous driving. We are pioneering an end to end AI approach that enables vehicles to learn directly from real world experience, developing the ability to adapt, generalise and improve at scale. Instead of relying on hand coded rules or pre mapped environments, our AI Driver learns to drive by understanding the world around it. The result is technology that navigates complex urban environments with intelligence, precision and natural flow, unlocking meaningful advances in both safety and efficiency. We believe autonomy represents a once in a generation transformation in how people and goods move, comparable to the shift from horses to cars, and from human driven vehicles to intelligent machines.
Our ambition is to make autonomy universal. Wayve’s mapless and hardware agnostic AI platform integrates with global OEM partners, enabling continuous software evolution and unlocking advanced levels of automation from L2 plus through to L4 as our core AI model scales. In a race increasingly defined by intelligence and real world learning, Wayve is taking a distinct approach, building a generalisable driving intelligence that can power any vehicle, anywhere. By combining embodied AI with scalable deployment, we are creating technology that can be shaped to each OEM brand and driver experience, accelerating the transition to a safer, more intelligent future of mobility.
How we work 💻- Locations & Flexible Working:
Our main hubs are in London, Sunnyvale, Yokohama, Herzliya, Vancouver and Leonberg. We operate a hybrid working model that combines in-person collaboration in our dedicated office spaces with focused time working remotely. This gives our teams the connection and energy of working together, alongside the flexibility to do their best work in a way that fits their lives.
🔍 The Interview Process:
Our process is clear and respectful of your time:
- Initial call / recruiter screen
- Competency Interviews
- Deep-dive technical interviews
- Final interview: mission & values alignment
We’ll always explain the format and work around your availability.
What’s in it for you (Location dependant):
💰 Salaries benchmarked against the market annually
📈 Meaningful equity, sharing in the ownership and long term success of Wayve
✈️ Relocation support and visa sponsorship where applicable
✅ Hybrid working, core hours and the chance to work hands on in vehicle workshops and labs
📚 Learning and development budgets with support for training, conferences and growth
🩺 Comprehensive benefits including health insurance, dental, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension where applicable, access to therapists, wellbeing partnerships, team socials and more
A quick, honest note before you apply.
Wayve is not a mature, fully-structured place with the playbook already written. Much of how we work is still being written, and if you join, you’ll help write it. That suits people who want real ownership more than people who need a settled structure from day one.
If that sounds like the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, we’d really like to hear from you.
At Wayve we're committed to creating a diverse, fair and respectful culture that is inclusive of everyone based on their unique skills and perspectives, and regardless of sex, race, religion or belief, ethnic or national origin, disability, age, citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding) or any other basis as protected by applicable law.
For more information visit Careers at Wayve. https://wayve.ai/careers/ To learn more about what drives us, visit Values at Wayve https://wayve.ai/careers/
DISCLAIMER: We will not ask about marriage or pregnancy, care responsibilities or disabilities in any of our job adverts or interviews. However, we do look to capture information about care responsibilities, and disabilities among other diversity information as part of an optional DEI Monitoring form to help us identify areas of improvement in our hiring process and ensure that the process is inclusive and non-discriminatory.