Director, Procurement Strategy

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.

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