Strategic Tech Partnerships & Procurement Lead

The role

Multiverse is the UK’s largest apprenticeship provider and its first EdTech unicorn, and it’s rebuilding on an AI-first foundation. Enterprise Trust & Reliability is the layer where that platform meets the customer, the regulator, and the investor. Our mission is to turn enterprise trust into enterprise revenue: the guardrails, integrations, and vendor relationships that let Multiverse move fast without breaking the trust that enterprise customers pay for.

We’re hiring our first Strategic Partnerships & Procurement Lead: the commercial operator who owns how we buy, renew, and partner on technology. You’ll sit at the seam between engineering, security, legal, finance, and our vendors, and you’ll turn tooling spend and partner relationships into commercial advantage.

This is a high‑autonomy, high‑influence individual‑contributor role reporting to the Senior Director of the function.

Build and own strategic partnerships with the technology providers that matter most — model providers like Anthropic or ChatGPT, hyperscalers like AWS and Google, major platforms like Salesforce or Oracle, and developer and security tooling vendors. Keep these relationships warm and know when to activate them. Look past cost: proactively find where a partnership can unlock real value for the business, whether that’s training, co‑building, product integrations, or better commercial terms.

Centralise and modernise how we buy, renew, and consolidate technology
, building this from a low base. That means a single software asset register, a clear intake‑and‑approval flow, and legal and security engaged early as a gate to clear, not a blocker to fight. Bring total cost of ownership and usage‑based pricing into the open so spend maps to outcomes.

Own the live threads from day one — including our LLM enterprise contracts, AI tooling, Identity platforms and other software contracts — and hold the pen on negotiations and renewals across the wider technology portfolio.

Turn procurement and partnerships into a commercial lever, not a cost centre. You’ll sit at the seam between engineering, security, legal and finance, influencing outcomes across teams you don’t manage — so persuasion and clarity carry the role. Done well, this also becomes trust and vendor evidence that helps enterprise and regulated customers say yes faster.

At Multiverse, AI is our engine, not an add‑on. In this seat that’s literal: you’ll be buying, negotiating, and partnering on the exact tools that make it true, and modelling what they cost and what they return. We expect you to use AI daily in your own work — from drafting and comparing contracts to analysing spend — and to be genuinely curious about a tooling and AI‑provider market that looks different every quarter.

You’ve built and grown relationships with major technology partners— AWS, Google, Salesforce, Anthropic‑type organisations — and can point to commercial impact you unlocked, not just costs you cut.

You’re comfortable inside a procurement process too: you’ve negotiated and renewed software, cloud, or SaaS contracts and can speak to the trade‑offs you made, you understand consumption‑based pricing, and you’re at ease driving a decision across security, legal and finance without owning those teams. But procurement isn’t the whole story for you — you think about what a vendor relationship can build, not just what it costs, and you treat compliance as a lever rather than a blocker.

You’re technically literate enough to challenge a vendor’s claim without being an engineer, and comfortable navigating an engineering and product environment rather than operating purely from the business side. We’re looking for AI acumen too: you understand the competitive AI landscape — Anthropic, Google, AWS and others — well enough to advise on real strategic calls, like whether our current AI partner remains the right long‑term one.

What this role isn’t. This is an internal commercial seat, not a sales role: no quota, no pipeline, no external revenue target. Your customers are our engineers and the business. You don’t need to be an engineer (technical fluency,…