Technical Procurement Specialist

Our client is one of the worlds leading algorithmic trading firms using state-of-the-art machine learning technology to trade across equities fixed income currencies commodities and crypto. The firm trades at significant scale across dozens of countries and employs world-class researchers developers and technologists with backgrounds in pure mathematics physics computer science and machine learning.

Technology is the business. The firm operates one of the most significant computational research clusters in the trading industry comprising tens of thousands of GPUs and hundreds of petabytes of storage. It is actively expanding its data centre footprint including a large-scale facility currently under construction in Europe.

The Role

This is a newly created position the first of its kind within the firm. The Technical Procurement Specialist will serve as the firms smart buyer for everything that makes its physical infrastructure run. This is not a traditional procurement role. It is a role for someone who can talk GPU infrastructure and data centre specs with engineers in the morning and negotiate commercial contracts with vendors in the afternoon.

The successful candidate will own the firms approach to sourcing and deploying GPU servers HPC clusters colocation capacity exchange connectivity cooling systems dark fibre and network hardware. This is a role managing hundreds of millions in annual spend working directly alongside the engineering and infrastructure teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Research evaluate negotiate and procure IT hardware HPC and GPU infrastructure enterprise software data centre and colocation services cloud services and related professional services.
  
• Support procurement and delivery of high-performance infrastructure projects including compute GPU storage network power cooling data centre capacity and exchange connectivity.
  
• Run structured sourcing processes including RFIs RFPs vendor evaluation commercial negotiation contract review purchase approvals and implementation handover.
  
• Work with engineering and infrastructure teams to evaluate technical options vendor roadmaps availability lead times support models deployment risks and total cost of ownership.
  
• Manage supplier relationships across OEMs resellers data centre and colocation providers network carriers software vendors and professional services firms.
  
• Support technical project management and delivery across data centre exchange connectivity network and infrastructure services including physical white space deployment.
  
• Manage hardware and enterprise software asset lifecycles including renewals maintenance utilisation refresh planning and decommissioning.
  
• Conduct cost reconciliation spend analysis budget tracking vendor reporting and financial data administration.
  
• Improve procurement processes documentation governance and stakeholder workflows.
  

Requirements

Essential Requirements

• Deep hands-on technical knowledge of HPC and GPU infrastructure including physical deployment and commissioning of GPU clusters accelerated compute systems and high-density data centre environments.
  
• Direct experience working in or deploying infrastructure into white space data centre environments including rack and stack power cooling and structured cabling.
  
• Strong understanding of data centre environments compute storage networking colocation and deployment constraints.
  
• Proven ability to engage credibly with engineers on technical specifications while also owning the commercial and contractual process with vendors.
  
• Experience with exchange connectivity low-latency network infrastructure or trading-related infrastructure is a strong advantage.
  
• Commercially astute with strong negotiation skills and the ability to assess vendor proposals commercial models contractual terms and total cost of ownership.
  
• Proven project management experience delivering technical infrastructure or data centre projects.
  
• Effective communicator capable of translating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and commercial constraints for technical stakeholders.
  
• Financial services or research computing environment experience is advantageous.
  
• Full relocation support and visa sponsorship are available for the right candidate.
  

Ideal Background

The ideal candidate will have come from one or more of the following backgrounds:

• Pre-sales solutions architect or technical account manager at an HPC or AI infrastructure vendor with experience supporting large-scale GPU or HPC deployments.
  
• Technical project or programme manager who has delivered HPC or AI infrastructure deployments end to end including physical white space commissioning.
  
• In-house infrastructure procurement professional with genuine HPC or GPU technical depth and hands-on deployment experience.
  
• Data centre or colocation operations professional who has moved into or alongside commercial and procurement functions.