Procurement Lead

Ektis is a boutique financial services consulting firm operating at the heart of the GCC's financial ecosystem. We partner with banks, fintechs, development finance institutions, and public-sector clients to solve their most critical challenges - spanning strategy, commercial growth, risk, payments, and transformation.

Ektis is a boutique financial services consulting firm operating at the heart of the GCC's financial ecosystem. We partner with banks, fintechs, development finance institutions, and public-sector clients to solve their most critical challenges - spanning strategy, commercial growth, risk, payments, and transformation.

The Procurement Lead owns how the firm buys. This is an internally facing role based in Saudi Arabia, reporting to the Chief Financial Officer, and covering procurement across the KSA and UAE entities.

The firm spends a growing share of its money with third parties. Technology licences and cloud, subcontractors and associates, professional services, marketing, travel, office and facilities. Today that spend is managed capably but informally, and it is reaching the size where informality starts to cost real money and create real risk. This role exists to put proper structure around it without slowing the business down.

The centre of gravity is hands-on delivery rather than policy writing. The successful candidate will be running live sourcing exercises, negotiating contracts, building the supplier base and setting up the process at the same time. There is no team to inherit and no established procurement function to maintain. There is a business that needs one built, and a CFO who wants it built properly.

The successful candidate will be measured on delivered savings and avoided cost, the commercial quality and risk position of the contracts the firm signs, the speed at which the business can buy what it genuinely needs, and the strength of the supplier base and procurement discipline they leave in place.

• Sourcing and category management
• Own end-to-end sourcing across all third-party spend, from requirement definition through market approach, evaluation, negotiation and award
• Build a clear view of the firm's spend by category, supplier and entity, and use it to prioritise where procurement effort creates the most value
• Develop category strategies for the material areas of spend, in particular technology and cloud, subcontractors and associates, professional services and facilities
• Run competitive processes proportionate to the value and risk involved, and resist unnecessary process on low value purchases
• Contracting and commercial negotiation
• Lead commercial negotiation on price, terms, service levels and exit, and hold the line on the terms that matter
• Own the firm's supplier contract templates and standard terms, working with legal counsel on drafting and with the CFO on commercial position
• Maintain a complete contract register with renewal dates, notice periods, commitment levels and owners, so no renewal happens by default
• Support client-side commercial work where subcontractor and associate arrangements underpin a client engagement, in particular flow-down of client terms
• Supplier management and performance
• Build and manage the supplier base, including onboarding, due diligence, segmentation and performance review
• Run structured reviews with strategic suppliers and hold them to what they committed to
• Manage supplier risk, including financial standing, information security posture, data protection obligations, insurance and continuity
• Resolve supplier disputes and performance failures early and commercially
• Process, governance and controls
• Design and run a procure-to-pay process that is simple enough for a firm of…