Procurement Manager

Oxide Computer Company • Full-time • Remote • $275k / year • 9h ago

Are you a strategic purchasing expert who thrives on making deals, managing supply risk, and keeping production moving? We’re looking for a Procurement Manager to own supplier relationships, negotiate long-term agreements, and ensure availability aligns with our build plans. You’ll interface with engineering, operations, and our contract manufacturing partners – making sure we have what we need, when we need it, at the right cost, and in the right place.

We are looking to add several category manager roles as we build out Oxide’s Procurement team:

Electronics Component Category Manager responsible for materials that populate our boards and power our racks end-to-end: semiconductors / ICs, passives, and power / thermal parts. This is where our highest-value, longest-lead time, and most allocation-sensitive parts live. An ideal background has a focus in semiconductors with significant exposure and demonstrated impact in compute & memory, but applicants with electronics experience without this focus may still be considered.
Mechanical Category Manager, responsible for the physical parts that make up our rack and systems: chassis, sheet metal, rack frame and rails, cabling and harnesses, fasteners, and related fabricated components. This is a world of drawings, tolerances, tooling, and custom fabrication partners, distinct from our electrical supply chain with dedicated ownership. We’re looking for someone with broad experience in metal forming, machining, molding and additional mechanical component manufacturing sourcing.

For both categories, we are looking for someone who can also own a wide surface initially and help define what focused category management looks like at Oxide. The scope is intentionally broad to start and will sharpen over time as the team grows.

As a procurement category manager, you will:

Procurement & Supplier Management

Negotiate pricing, lead times, and long-term supply agreements with key component vendors
Track purchase price variance (PPV) and help finance and engineering understand cost drivers
Maintain up-to-date price lists, quotes, lead times, country of origin information, tariffs, and supplier commitments by part number and revision
Evaluate supplier quality, ensuring use of authorized distributors
Collaborate with our contract manufacturers (CMs) to translate production forecasts into material requirements and allocation plans
Work directly with suppliers to ensure availability, secure allocations, and preempt shortages for long-lead and critical parts
Track supplier performance on delivery, cost, and responsiveness, and escalate as needed to meet production timelines
Lead supplier negotiations while coordinating CM purchasing on our behalf
Reconcile material usage and purchasing activity between Oxide and our CM to ensure build readiness and cost accuracy
Define and improve procurement processes, documentation standards, and vendor onboarding workflows
Provide insight into market dynamics, sourcing alternatives, and risk mitigation strategies

Systems & Process Development

Help define and improve procurement / material management processes and documentation standards
Work closely with planning and engineering to integrate part lifecycle, lead times, and inventory policies

You will thrive in this role if you:

Have experience managing procurement for complex hardware systems, either in the electronics / server industry or with a focus on mechanical enclosure components
Are skilled negotiating supplier agreements and securing commitments in constrained or single-source markets
Understand how contract manufacturers manage delegated procurement and material purchases
Enjoy digging into BOMs, spreadsheets, and quote packages to make sure the numbers are right
Communicate clearly, especially when tracking issues across engineering, operations, and finance
Are organized, persistent, and calm under pressure, especially when lead times stretch and allocations tighten
Are motivated by getting the right parts, at the right time, for the right price
Find creative solutions ranging from connecting with unresponsive suppliers to resolving component end of life
Are curious, detail-oriented, and calm in the face of ambiguity or unexpected challenges

Before applying for this role, you should:

Browse our public Requests for Discussion to get a flavor for how we work
Listen to Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz to familiarize yourself with the Oxide hiring process.
Listen to some of our episodes of Oxide and Friends. A few recommendations:
- Scaling Manufacturing about our experience rapidly ramping our manufacturing and supply chain.
- Tales from Manufacturing: Shipping Rack 1 to hear about how everything came together for our first customer shipment.
- Integrating Hardware and Software Teams on the benefits of having hardware and software engineers working together.

Life at Oxide

We are very explicit about our values, and they can be seen in daily life at Oxide, for example:

Our rigor means we enjoy and take pride in the craft of engineering.
Our urgency means that we are not above the judicious short-cut.
Our versatility is reflected in our greatest strength: the breadth of our team.
Our transparency can be seen in our consensus-driven RFD process.
Our responsibility means that we both lead and follow: we have our own domains, but we also help others on their parts.
Our curiosity shows in our insatiable desire to learn – and our empathy in our love of teaching others.
Our humor is a big part of our daily lives: we are inveterate wise-crackers whose video meetings spill into simultaneous text chat.