Procurement Manager

Cargoplot promises importers choice, transparency and reliability. That promise is only as good as the suppliers behind it: the truckers who collect in the Netherlands, the carriers who move the boxes, the agents who handle origin in China. Today those relationships are spread across the team. This role brings them under one owner.

You negotiate what we buy, you hold suppliers to the quality we sell, and you carry the consequences when something goes wrong. This is a hands-on role, close to the operation.

What you'll own

The supplier base

• Source, vet, onboard and contract suppliers: NL trucking first, plus ocean and air carriers and our origin agents in China
• Keep enough coverage and redundancy per lane that no single supplier can take our service down
• Offboard suppliers who don't perform, and do it before ops has to work around them
• Own supplier data and rate cards in Notion and the platform, so sales and ops quote from one source of truth

The buy side

• Negotiate rates, surcharges, free time, D&D terms and payment terms
• Run rate renewals and tenders; own our buy rates
• Secure capacity ahead of peak, CNY, Golden Week, Q4

Quality and accountability

• Define what good looks like per supplier type: on-time pickup and delivery, document accuracy and timeliness, data quality in our platform, response time, damage and claims rate
• Run a scorecard per supplier and a review cadence with the ones that matter most
• Be the single owner when a supplier causes a problem: root cause, recovery of cost where warranted, claims handled
• Be the escalation of last resort for ops when a supplier stops performing, and turn repeat failures into a supplier decision, not another escalation

Cross team

• Serve sales and pricing with buy rates and feasibility on new lanes
• Work with product and ops on what suppliers must do in our platform: bookings, milestones, documents, and hold them to actually doing it
• Report supplier cost, quality and risk to leadership in numbers, not anecdotes

What this role really requires

• You negotiate for a living. You know what a fair rate looks like in a given market and you're comfortable saying no.
• You're in the details. You can read a rate sheet, spot the surcharge that shouldn't be there, and explain invoices line by line.
• You hold people to their word. Suppliers like you, and they also know you'll call them when they do not perform.
• You take the hit. When a supplier fails, you don't distribute the blame. You own the fix and the recovery.
• You work with data. You monitor supplier performance and explain the numbers, rather than describing in anecdotes.

What you bring

• Experience in freight forwarding, road transport or logistics procurement: you've bought capacity or managed suppliers yourself
• A track record of negotiating rates and contracts with truckers, carriers or agents
• Strong command of English and Dutch, which is required for the NL trucking market
• Structured and decisive: you can hold 20 supplier relationships without losing track of any of them
• Comfortable working with Asian origin partners across time zones and cultures
• Happy to be on the road. You'd rather sit in a trucker's office than send another email. Driving licence needed.
• You take ownership, and you'd rather fix the root cause than manage the symptom

What success looks like

First 90 days

• Complete picture of who we buy from, at what rate, on what terms
• Scorecard live for the NL trucking base and the China agents

First year

• The three worst-performing suppliers either on a corrective plan or replaced
• Supplier-caused incidents down, and the ones that happen are recovered where they should be
• No lane dependent on a single supplier
• Ops escalates supplier issues to you and they stop coming back
• Supplier reliability is reportable to customers on our core lanes, consistent definitions, data we trust, numbers we're willing to show

The metrics you own

• Invoiced vs. quoted rate
• Supplier on-time performance (pickup and delivery)
• Document accuracy and timeliness
• Incident rate per 100 shipments, and cost recovered from suppliers
• Coverage depth per lane
• Coverage and freshness of the reliability data we report to customers

What this role is not

• Not a partnerships or business development role: you buy, you don't sell
• Not a pricing analyst role: you own the relationships, not just the spreadsheet
• Not a people-management role today. You own a domain, not a team.

How you'll work

Three days in the Amsterdam office, two days on the road. Not a rule, a rhythm, but it's the shape we expect, because you can't hold a supplier to a standard you've never seen in person. Expect to be at trucking yards and warehouses in the Netherlands regularly.

If you're looking for a role you can do from a desk, this isn't it.

What we pay

Base salary: €62,000 – €78,000 gross per year, based on a 40-hour week, excluding 8% holiday. Where you land in the band depends on how much of this you've done before, not on how hard you negotiate.

On top of that

• 8% holiday allowance
• 20 holidays
• Learning budget
• Laptop
• 10% variable compensation based on KPIs to be set together (composed of cash and equity)

What you can expect

• High ownership from day one: this domain is yours, with a direct report line to C-level
• Direct influence on our margin and our service level
• A platform being built around you, and a product team that listens
• High pace, real impact, no layers between you and the decision

If you want a role where you decide who we work with, what we pay, and what standard we hold them to, this is it.