OpenWorks Engineering
Senior Buyer
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The Opportunity
We're looking for a Senior Buyer who can strengthen our supply chain, build strategic supplier partnerships and keep critical components moving reliably into our products.
As a Senior Buyer, you will play a pivotal role in securing the goods, services, and strategic supplier partnerships that enable the delivery of cutting-edge defence capabilities to customers around the world. Working within a high-performing developing procurement team, you will develop and execute sourcing strategies for critical materials and complex supply chains, ensuring quality, value, resilience, and compliance across our programmes.
This is an opportunity to influence supplier strategy, negotiate high-value contracts, and build long-term partnerships that support the successful delivery of technologically advanced products in a fast-paced, highly regulated environment. You will collaborate closely with engineering, manufacturing, quality, and programme teams to ensure materials and services are delivered on time, to specification, and in support of demanding operational and customer requirements.
Security Vetting Information
OpenWorks Engineering operates within the defence sector. As part of our recruitment and onboarding processes, we collect information that may be required to support future security vetting and clearance requirements, should these become necessary during employment.
Who We Are
OpenWorks is a rapidly growing business operating globally with a passion for exceptional engineering and building on a legacy of defence innovation in the North East of England.
Our products provide ultra-high performance, real-time detection, tracking, identification and targeting of dynamic aerial threats. They have been deployed internationally to protect high profile military and civilian assets, and contribute towards the defeat of nuisance, misguided and maliciously deployed drones during operations.
We are very proud to have supported a wide range of law enforcement and military operators, protecting many of the most high profile sites and individuals around the world.
The amazing things we do are only possible because of a dedicated and passionate team.
Why You’ll Love Working With Us
Join a high-energy, collaborative team where great ideas thrive, challenges are embraced, and people genuinely love what they do.
Here’s what our benefits have to offer:
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- Rewarding Success - Competitive salary, starting from £40,000, plus a discretionary annual bonus of up to 25% of salary alongside a structured pay progression framework.
- Enhanced Pension – Up to 8% employer-matched contributions to help you plan for the future.
- More Time to Recharge – 25 days’ holiday plus public holidays, long-service rewards, and the option to buy up to 5 extra days.
- Breakfast & Lunch on Us – Enjoy team breakfasts and freshly prepared lunches every day courtesy of Chef Mark and his team.
- Health & Wellbeing – Private healthcare and life assurance for added peace of mind.
- Sustainable Travel – Salary sacrifice schemes, including EV car and Cycle to Work options.
- Team Socials – Regular events, from quiz nights and football to board games and more.
- Learning & Growth – A culture that empowers you to challenge, grow and make an impact, plus a £250 annual learning budget to invest in the development that matters most to you.
What you’ll be doing:
Responsibilities
- Managing end to end procurement activities for direct and indirect spend categories
- Lead end to end procurement activities for electronic components, mechanical assemblies, optics and associated componentry to support C-UAS programmes
- Identify, evaluate, select and onboard suppliers capable of meeting technical, commercial, quality and security requirements
- Identifying, developing and driving the implementation of sourcing strategies that deliver value, reduce risk in line with the business growth plan and associated objectives
- Negotiating commercial terms, pricing and contractual agreements with suppliers
- Developing and maintaining strong relationships with critical suppliers with the aim of improving performance, quality, innovation, delivery and long-term performance
- Collaboration with engineering, programme management, manufacturing, quality, senior management and finance team to support project delivery
- Development of supplier performance through generation and ongoing management of KPI’s with the aim of driving continuous improvement initiatives
- Identification of supply chain risk including obsolescence, capacity constraints and geopolitical impacts
- Managing cost saving initiatives and value engineering opportunities
- Supporting new product introduction (NPI) and strategic supply chain planning
- Planning and conducting supplier audits to assess quality systems, process capability, regulatory compliance and operational performance whilst driving corrective actions where required
- Ensuring compliance with defence procurement regulations, export controls and internal governance processes
- Drive data integrity improvement projects reviewing and cleansing procurement and supplier master data to enhance accuracy, standardise records and improve reporting
- Monitor market trends, supplier capabilities and industry developments to strengthen the supply base and support innovation.
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What we’re looking for:
- CIPS Qualification: Qualified or working towards desirable
- 5 years+ procurement experience in a senior role – In defence, aerospace, electronics industry is preferred but not essential
- Attention to Detail: Strong curiosity, creativity, highly organised with attention to detail
- Communication Skills: Clear and effective written and verbal communication skills with internal and external stakeholders
- Process and supply chain improvement mindset: Ability to identify opportunities to mitigate supply chain risk and generate process efficiencies
- Troubleshooting Resilience: Persistence, patience, and resilience when working through complex supply chain issues with the ability to generate supporting corrective action plans
- Decision Making – Strong decision making and problem-solving capability
- Balanced Approach: Able to balance cost, quality, delivery, security and compliance to achieve programme delivery success
- Travel Flexibility: Willingness to travel for short supplier visit trips.
More about us:
Vision
Help protect the territory and airspace of NATO countries and their allies.
Mission
Be a world-leading provider of autonomous technology for Surveillance applications and Defence.
Values
- Be a Good Egg: Earn respect, have mutual trust and be honest
- Do cool stuff: We develop cool tech with an awesome team, and we get stuff done
- Be empowered: We are autonomous, reliable and take personal responsibility
- We are one team: Look out for each other and the team
- Things go wrong: Fail fast, learn and move on
- Have fun: We’re doing amazing things with passionate people
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