Director – Vendor Management & Learning & Development

Job Description:

The opportunity
Shaip by Ubiquity seeks a Director to lead five functions: VMS Live Projects, VMS Community, VMS Crowd, VMS Strategic Partnerships, and Learning & Development (L&D). This is a supply-side operations leadership role responsible for building reliable global contributor and partner capacity, delivering vendor-side commitments, controlling supplier economics, and ensuring the workforce is qualified and production-ready. This Director is a peer of the leaders responsible for core delivery, Physical AI delivery, and Pre-Sales & Solutioning.
Functional leadership and governance
● Lead the five VMS and L&D functions through their managers and specialists; set clear ownership, budgets, operating rhythms, development plans and succession coverage.
● Publish weekly dashboards for sourcing pipeline, verified capacity, fill rate, activation, training readiness, vendor performance, risk and spend.
Global sourcing, community and crowd
● Build a geographically and linguistically diverse network of qualified vendors, field partners, freelancers, experts and contributors aligned to forecast demand.
● Own community growth, contributor engagement and retention, recruitment funnels, identity/eligibility controls, incentives, geographic quotas and hard-to-source cohorts.
● Maintain accurate, evidence-backed supply and surge-capacity forecasts; diversify concentration and develop contingency suppliers.
Strategic partnerships and vendor economics
● Identify, diligence, negotiate and onboard partners; coordinate legal, procurement and InfoSec review of rights, consent, security and subcontractor requirements.
● Manage rate cards, effective cost per accepted unit, recruitment/acquisition costs, payment terms, partner scorecards, capacity commitments and performance improvement plans.
● Provide validated vendor rates, throughput, availability and risk assumptions to Pre-Sales; flag nonviable commitments before external quotations are approved.
VMS live projects and delivery coordination
● Own supplier-side staffing, mobilization, allocations, vendor SLAs, issue escalation and recovery during live programs, partnering with Vivek and Darshan for overall customer delivery.
● Monitor submission/acceptance yield, rejection and rework by vendor; resolve systemic issues and maintain fallback plans.
Learning and Development
● Build role-based onboarding, qualification tests, guideline training, calibration, recertification and remediation for contributors, reviewers and partners.
● Tie training capacity and pass rates to project ramp plans and quality outcomes; partner with Delivery/QA on measurable readiness gates. Shaip by Ubiquity • Job description • October 2026
Risk and operational improvement
● Maintain audit-ready records for contributor consent, data provenance, vendor agreements, compliant worker engagement and access controls in partnership with Legal/InfoSec.
● Improve onboarding cycle time, workforce activation, sourcing automation, forecasting accuracy and quality-adjusted unit cost without compromising fairness or compliance.
Candidate profi le
● Proven leadership of managers and multi-function vendor/crowd or distributed workforce operations; quantified scale of people, countries, partners and spend.
● Direct exposure to data collection, annotation, GenAI data, speech/audio, CV, healthcare or physical AI supply chains; ability to learn adjacent service lines.
● Strong negotiating skills, vendor governance, workforce capacity planning and cost/yield analytics.
● Experience building repeatable training, qualification and certification processes, or close operating responsibility for them.
● Comfort working with US/global teams and managing risks, operational metrics and senior escalations.
Measures of success
Verified capacity coverage and fill rate • time to source/activate • qualified contributor and vendor supply • training-to-production pass rate • cost per accepted unit and supplier savings • vendor SLA/acceptance performance • diversity and continuity of supply • post-launch staffing variances • compliance and audit readiness.
Decision rights and interfaces