Senior Procurement Category Manager, API
About this opportunity
Job Description Summary
Sandoz continues to go through an exciting and transformative period as a global leader and pioneering provider of sustainable Biosimilar and Generic medicines. As we continue down this new and ambitious path, unique opportunities will present themselves, both professionally and personally. Join us, the future is ours to shape!
As a Senior Procurement Category Manager, API, you will lead the development and execution of sourcing strategies for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and intermediates sourced from China, supporting multiple manufacturing sites globally. Working closely with cross-functional stakeholders, you will drive supplier performance, cost competitiveness, supply security, and risk mitigation across a strategic spend portfolio. This role plays a critical part in ensuring a reliable and sustainable supply of key materials that enable uninterrupted production and support the delivery of high-quality medicines to patients worldwide.
Job Description
Your Key Responsibilities:
Your responsibilities include, but not limited to:
Lead the development and execution of sourcing strategies for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) and intermediates sourced from China, supporting multiple global manufacturing sites.
Manage a portfolio of approximately USD50M in spend, driving commercial value through strategic sourcing, supplier negotiations, and contract management.
Identify, evaluate, and implement alternate sourcing opportunities to strengthen supply continuity and mitigate business risk.
Build and manage strategic relationships with API suppliers, ensuring strong performance, quality, reliability, and compliance.
Deliver procurement savings, cost avoidance, and value-creation initiatives aligned with global category objectives.
Partner closely with cross-functional stakeholders across Procurement, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Quality, Regulatory, and Technical Operations to support business priorities.
Monitor market trends, raw material pricing, supplier capabilities, and industry developments to provide actionable market intelligence and sourcing recommendations.
Ensure procurement activities align with company policies, regulatory requirements, ESG objectives, and supplier compliance standards.
What you’ll bring to the role:
Essential Requirements:
Minimum 5 years of direct procurement or strategic sourcing experience.
Proven experience managing supplier negotiations, contract management, and sourcing initiatives with measurable commercial outcomes.
Experience developing and executing sourcing strategies, including supplier selection, risk mitigation, and cost optimization initiatives.
Demonstrated ability to manage supplier relationships and drive procurement savings, cost avoidance, or value creation.
Fluency in both English and Mandarin, with the ability to engage effectively with suppliers and stakeholders across China and global teams.
Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills within a complex business environment.
Bachelor's degree in Business, Supply Chain, Procurement, Engineering, Life Sciences, Chemistry, or a related discipline.
Experience within the pharmaceutical, healthcare, life sciences, or other regulated manufacturing industries is preferred; exposure to API or direct material procurement and experience working in a global matrix organization would be advantageous.
Why Sandoz?
Generic and Biosimilar medicines are the backbone of the global medicines industry. Sandoz, a leader in this sector, provided more than 900 million patient treatments across 100+ countries in 2024 and while we are proud of this achievement, we have an ambition to do more!
With investments in new development capabilities, production sites, new acquisitions, and partnerships, we have the opportunity to shape the future of Sandoz and help more patients gain access to low-cost, high-quality medicines, sustainably.
Our momentum is powered by an open, collaborative culture driven by our talented and ambitious colleagues, who, in return for applying their skills experience an agile and collegiate environment with impactful, flexible-hybrid careers, where diversity is welcomed and where personal growth is supported!
Join us!
Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion:
We are committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams representative of the patients and communities we serve.
#Sandoz
Skills Desired
Effective Communication, Finance Management, Internal And External Customer Needs Analysis & Satisfaction Studies, Managing Resources, Negotiating
Job details
How this role compares
Computed from every other active Procurement role in our database, not just this employer's listings.
We currently track 102 comparable Manager Procurement roles across 17 biopharma companies.
Salary context
12 of 102 peers report a salary range (USD, annualized)
Peers share this role's job function and a matching or adjacent seniority level -- not necessarily the same therapeutic area or country.
Where these roles are based
Top locations among the 102 comparable roles
+ 19 more countries
Seniority mix
102 of 102 peers have a known seniority level
Therapeutic area mix
0 of 102 peers have a known therapeutic area; the rest are genuinely unlabeled, not hidden
No peers with a known therapeutic area yet.
Similar opportunities
The closest matches from our peer group, ranked by how similar they are, not how well you'd qualify for them -- treat this as market context, not a guaranteed shortlist; a weak match is labeled as one below.
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How we calculate "similar"
No black box, no LLM guesswork: a deterministic score built from four normalized attributes. Here's this role's own peer group at different match levels, so you can see the mechanism, not just the result.
Every comparison starts from the same 100-point budget: 25 for working in the same function, 40 for the same therapeutic area, 20 for the same or adjacent seniority, 15 for the same country. A dimension we can't confirm on both sides contributes nothing, never a guess, never a free pass.
0 points, never a partial guess. A role we know almost nothing about beyond its function bottoms out at 25%; it never inflates to 100% just because there's little to compare against. Seniority uses a defined ladder (Associate → Manager → Associate Director → Senior → Principal → Director → Senior Director → Executive/VP) so "Director" and "Senior Director" count as adjacent, but "Director" and "Executive/VP" do not.