Vendor Manager (Senior Consultant)

Job Title: Vendor Manager (Senior Consultant)
Location: London, 3 days per week onsite
Contract: 6 months
Salary: £80,000 or £550pd-£600pd, dependent on experience
Start: Immediately

The opportunity

Pace is looking for an experienced Vendor Manager to support one of our customers within a complex, fast-paced professional services environment.

This is a hands-on role for someone who knows how to turn commercial agreements into well-managed, high-performing services. You’ll help mobilise managed service providers, establish the right governance and reporting, monitor supplier performance and build constructive relationships between internal teams and strategic technology partners.

Working closely with Service Owners, Service Delivery Managers and Strategic Sourcing, you’ll ensure suppliers are operationally ready, contractual commitments are understood and performance, risk and spend are managed effectively.

What you’ll be doing

• Coordinate the mobilisation of managed services, establishing clear contacts, escalation routes, reporting structures and ways of working.
• Work with Service Owners and suppliers to agree performance baselines, KPIs and robust reporting methods.
• Establish and maintain practical contract-management frameworks, including risk registers, deliverables trackers, reporting packs and document repositories.
• Ensure suppliers have the systems access, licences, data, technology environments and other arrangements needed to begin delivering services successfully.
• Monitor supplier performance against contracts, SLAs and KPIs, identifying emerging issues and ensuring corrective actions are completed.
• Act as the day-to-day escalation point for supplier disputes and performance concerns, working across internal teams and external providers to reach practical resolutions.
• Identify and manage risks relating to service continuity, data compliance, billing, spend, supplier performance and cost.
• Review supplier invoices and expenditure to identify discrepancies, potential overcharging and opportunities to improve value.
• Support operational, quarterly and strategic supplier-review meetings, providing clear performance information and tracking agreed actions.
• Work with Strategic Sourcing and service-delivery teams to improve vendor-management practices and encourage supplier innovation, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
• Support contract changes, renewals, supplier transitions and exit planning, while Strategic Sourcing leads formal contractual amendments and due diligence.

Experience and Capabilities:

• Demonstrable practical experience in contract or vendor management within a large, complex organisation.
• Experience working with managed service providers or business process outsourcing arrangements.
• Ideally, experience within legal or professional services, although relevant experience from another complex environment will also be considered.
• Demonstrable experience establishing contract-management tools, trackers, governance and reporting frameworks.
• The ability to interpret and apply detailed commercial contracts, service schedules, SLAs and performance regimes.
• Strong supplier-relationship, stakeholder-management and conflict-resolution skills.
• A sound understanding of financial controls, supplier billing, payment processes and cost-optimisation opportunities.
• A structured, proactive approach to risk management, escalation and issue resolution.
• Excellent attention to detail, alongside the ability to communicate complex information clearly and succinctly.
• A collaborative and inclusive working style, with the confidence to work independently and constructively challenge where needed.

What you’ll bring to the team

You’ll be commercially aware without losing sight of relationships. You’ll know when to challenge, when to collaborate and when an issue needs to be escalated. Most importantly, you’ll create clarity and structure, helping internal teams and suppliers work together to deliver reliable, compliant and continually improving services.

Why join Pace?

At Pace, our consultants care about the impact their work has on our customers and the people they serve. We take a human-centred approach to transformation, combining practical problem-solving with the structure and momentum needed to deliver meaningful change.

You’ll join a growing consultancy that values integrity, personal development, social responsibility and the real-world impact of its work. Pace offers structured development planning, regular coaching conversations and access to a personal training budget, subject to approval.

Compensation and Benefits include:

• 25 days’ annual leave, plus Bank Holidays and an extra day for your birthday
• Option to purchase up to 10 additional days of leave per year
• AVIVA workplace pension scheme
• Save 30–60% on an electric car through The Electric Car Scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Access to Pace’s APM Corporate Partner benefits
• ADS Group Reward benefits
• One paid day off to volunteer
• Enhanced Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave
• Work from Abroad policy
• Regular company and team events
• Reservist leave: up to 10 days paid

* Please note that some benefits are for permanent employees only