Vendor Manager

Location: Boston, USA / Moscow, Russia / Remote

Our team is passionate about building a product that improves the global language industry. Smartcat’s goal is to develop the world’s best environment for translation and industry-specific payment automation and make it a vibrant network enabling easy collaboration for all market participants, including freelance linguists, translation agencies, and translation buyers.

Smartcat is backed by Matrix Partners, a top VC firm focusing on SaaS and marketplace startups (you might recognize names like HubSpot, Oculus, Zendesk, and Quora in their portfolio).

Mission

The mission of Head of VM is to build a strong foundation for fast revenue growth in the Smartcat Vendor Management department by offering solid and high-quality search results to our clients worldwide. This includes providing an out-of-the-box approach to tackling Smartcat clients’ demand for Vendors — both Freelancers and LSPs — and enabling a sustainable growth of the Smartcat freelancer database in a variety of language pairs. You will work closely with Smartcat Sales and Customer Success who will be requesting you to source vendors for various projects and programs.

Your outcomes

• Have full ownership of Smartcat’s 200,000+ freelancer and LSP database.
• Lead Smartcat’s vendor management department to fulfill dozens of requests per day from both clients that hire us as an outsourced Vendor Management department and those sending one-time requests.
• Proactively improve and strengthen the freelancer database for both filling the gaps in it and improving its quality.
• Meet quarterly plans on the revenue generated by Vendor Management services.
• Collaborate with other teams in Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Product, etc. to improve the Vendor Management offering.

Requirements

• Active management of supplier database
• At least 1 year of experience working as a Customer Success Manager with outstanding measurable achievements.
• Find and test new specialized vendors based on production needs
• Accurately forecast revenue and Jobs Filled
• Anticipate and plan resource demand
• Develop, track, and validate vendor KPIs
• Evaluate and track vendor performance
• Provide feedback to vendors and arbitrate
• At least two years of experience working as a head of VM or in a similar role in an LSP, with outstanding measurable achievements.
• Excellent communication skills to interact with clients, colleagues, partners, and freelancers. We are in a niche global industry ($45b) where trust and good relations matter.
• Easy-going personality, high tolerance to different cultures. We love our users, who are literally everywhere on the planet, and they love Smartcat back.
• Ability to understand Smartcat’s vision and functionality of the whole platform in depth. We are building a market network for the global translation industry, which is a complex multi-sided marketplace on top of an industry-specific workflow automation solution. (To learn more about the market network concept, read this article.)
• Data-driven approach to business. Readiness to measure success based on numbers.
• Integrity and full commitment.
• Readiness to work in a highly intense startup environment, requiring extreme focus, a sense of urgency and persistence to break through.
• Openness to constructive criticism and others’ opinions and ideas.
• Being eager for success and aggressive for growth.