Senior Operations Associate (Procurement and Contracts) in London

Evident is an intelligence platform that benchmarks and tracks AI adoption across the financial services sector. Our mission is to accelerate the adoption of AI across the sector by creating the most complete, unbiased and transparent public benchmarks of AI capability. Since the launch of our flagship product in January 2023, the Evident AI Index has rapidly become the global standard benchmark for AI maturity in financial services.

We are looking for a commercially minded and highly organised Procurement & Contracts Associate to own Evident's customer procurement and contracting processes. This is a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience on the other side of the procurement table and build a distinctive commercial skill set. You will help some of the world's leading financial institutions onboard Evident as a supplier, navigate complex procurement requirements and progress contracts from sale through to signature and payment.

Key Responsibilities

• Own customer procurement processes from confirmed sale through contract signature, invoicing and payment completion.
• Act as the main day-to-day contact for customer procurement and legal teams, proactively driving each process forward and following up on outstanding actions to prevent delays.
• Own the preparation of contracts throughout the customer lifecycle, including new sales, amendments and renewals.
• Review, redline and negotiate customer contracts, addressing legal and commercial risks to protect Evident's interests.
• Build and maintain a negotiation repository to capture common requests, approved responses and lessons learnt, turning recurring issues into reusable guidance and templates.
• Maintain Evident's procurement hub - our source of truth for all deal and contract information - ensuring that procurement activity, commercial terms, next steps and supporting documentation are complete and accurate.
• Track and analyse key metrics, such as time spent at each stage of the procurement cycle, to identify bottlenecks, uncover trends and drive improvements that shorten completion times.
• Complete customer due-diligence requests, including information security, financial and supplier-risk questionnaires.
• Work closely with the Commercial and Account Management teams to translate agreed commercial terms into contracts and provide clear visibility into progress and blockers throughout the procurement cycle.

Core Skills

• 1-3 years of experience in commercial contracts, customer procurement, contract management, legal operations or a related role.
• Experience supporting enterprise B2B contracting and procurement processes, ideally within research, data or information services, financial services or another regulated industry.
• Demonstrable experience reviewing and redlining commercial agreements, including NDAs, order forms, statements of work, master services agreements, data-processing agreements and security schedules.
• Strong commercial judgement, with the ability to assess contractual risk and balance risk management with commercial priorities.
• Excellent communication and drafting skills, with confidence working with customer procurement and legal teams and senior stakeholders.
• Strong organisational skills and comfortable working in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to have

• A legal, paralegal or contract management qualification.
• Experience working with financial institutions, such as banks and insurers, or other businesses with complex procurement and vendor-risk processes.
• Experience using AI tools to automate procurement or contracting processes.

Benefits

• Share options: we offer all employees share options over a 4 year vesting period.
• Holidays: 28 days of holiday + public bank holidays.
• Flexible working: 3 days per week in our Central London office, 2 days remote.
• Learning & development budget: £1000/year.
• Pension.
• Private health insurance.

Our commitments to diversity and inclusion

Evident is committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion among our workforce, and eliminating all forms of discrimination. Our aim is for our workforce to be truly representative of all sections of society and our customers, and for each employee to feel respected and able to give their best.