Procurement & Contracts Lead

Join the future of news We’re on a mission to deliver riveting storytelling for all of America. At The Washington Post, you’ll help reinvent news. Our work is driven by a deep investigative spirit and enhanced by innovation to bring audiences closer to the stories that matter most. About Our Team The Washington Post is powered by the passion and talent of our people. It takes all of us to reinvent news. Beyond our award-winning News and Opinions teams, we work across many departments, including Brand & Events, Communications, Customer Care, Engineering & Product, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Marketing & Advertising, Print Operations, and Sales. Why This Role Matters   Why This Role Matters The Procurement & Contracts Lead strengthens The Washington Post’s ability to make disciplined, informed decisions about its most important vendor relationships. This role manages strategic sourcing and contract activity across significant spend categories, including content and wire services, production and technology, and contingent and freelance labor. The role looks beyond contract administration to determine whether current vendors, tools, and commercial arrangements continue to meet the organization’s business, financial, operational, and risk requirements. It leads structured sourcing and negotiation processes and provides decision-makers with clear, evidence-based recommendations to renew, renegotiate, consolidate, compete, or replace vendor arrangements. Working across Finance, Legal, IT, and business units, this position helps balance cost, service quality, operational requirements, contractual risk, and long-term business value. It also plays an important role in building a scalable strategic-sourcing and contract-management capability within a growing procurement function. What Motivates You You enjoy negotiating agreements that balance business value, cost, risk, flexibility, and service quality. You are curious about whether existing vendor relationships and technologies remain the right fit for the organization. You are comfortable challenging default renewals and recommending change when supported by evidence. You use market intelligence, spend data, and benchmarking to improve sourcing decisions and negotiation outcomes. You take pride in building trusted relationships with vendors and internal stakeholders. You enjoy bringing structure, transparency, and discipline to decisions that may previously have been made inconsistently. You are energized by helping build a procurement capability while continuing to deliver day-to-day sourcing and contracting work. You can influence decisions across functions without relying on formal authority. How You’ll Support the Mission Strategic sourcing and category management Manage strategic sourcing and category-management activity across assigned high-value and business-critical spend categories. Develop and maintain category strategies that align…