Indirect Procurement Specialist

Primary location: 3 days on site in Leatherhead, KT22 7BA, UK

Salary: up to £50,000 (dependent on experience)

About us:

Every refrigerated truck and trailer moving goods across the country has relied on diesel for decades. It's polluting, expensive, and the technology has not changed. Two companies have dominated the market, selling the same legacy technology with minor updates.

Sunswap makes the electric refrigeration that's replacing it — zero emissions, lower operating costs, built from the ground up for how fleets actually operate. Endurance runs frozen goods for 24 hours on a single charge and chilled goods for up to two months. Those numbers matter on the road, and getting them right took years of obsessive engineering from a team drawn from automotive, aerospace, and motorsport.

We have gone from founding to manufacturing at scale globally in just six years. We built our own production facility in Surrey. Today we are 200 times larger by square footage than when we started. We operate on three continents — units run across the UK, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Chile, and Australia. And we are trusted by major brands like Tesco, Ocado, Birds Eye, and Happy Eggs every single day.

We have been named Sunday Times Best Place to Work in 2024, 2025 and 2026. We have won awards for innovation, technology, and marketing excellence. In 2025 we were named Winner in the Excellence in Procurement category at the Made in Britain Impact Awards. We have backing from leading investors including BGF, Barclays, Clean Growth Fund, Shell, and Rabobank.

We have got the customers, the traction, and the momentum. Now we are taking this British-engineered product global — scaling manufacturing, opening new markets, and building the team that will make legacy polluting technology obsolete across the world.

If you want to be part of a company that is setting new standards for the industry and scaling internationally, this is it.

Our benefits:

• 30 days of annual leave (includes a Wellbeing Day)
• Sabbatical (after 3 years of working with Sunswap)
• 5 free counselling sessions per year
• Family leave ranging from 4 weeks to 4 months
• Free Monthly Lunches & Quarterly Socials!
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Sunswap merch

Job overview:

The Indirect Procurement Specialist owns Sunswap’s indirect spend; software and IT, production tooling, facilities, marketing, professional services and capex projects and is accountable for getting real commercial value from this category. Alongside this, the role owns our transport and logistics activity across the UK, EU and China, covering both import and export flows.

Indirect is the heart of the role. You will bring structure to spend that currently sits across multiple budget holders: building category plans, running proper sourcing events, negotiating and managing contracts and renewals, and holding suppliers to what they agreed. Transport sits with you as a second, self-contained area of ownership from freight forwarder selection and Incoterms through to customs compliance and landed cost.

You will work with a high degree of autonomy and directly with budget holders across the business, so the ability to influence stakeholders who are not procurement people is as important as the commercial skill. As the team grows, there is scope for this role to extend into direct commodity management as a development path for someone who wants to build a broader procurement career.

Key responsibilities:

Indirect category ownership

• Own Sunswap’s indirect categories end-to-end: software and SaaS, IT hardware and telecoms, production tooling, facilities management, marketing, professional services (legal, recruitment, consultancy) and capex projects.
• Build and own category plans for each area of indirect spend, setting out the supplier landscape, contract position, renewal calendar and savings opportunities.

Transport & logistics

• Own all inbound and outbound transport and logistics activity across the UK, EU and China, covering both import and export flows.
• Select, negotiate with and manage freight forwarders, customs brokers and 3PL partners; hold them to agreed cost, lead time and service levels.
• Own Incoterms across the supply base, ensuring terms are commercially appropriate and consistently applied.
• Ensure compliance with customs, duty, tariff classification, origin and export control requirements, and maintain the associated documentation and records.

Process, systems & analysis

• Develop and improve the processes that govern indirect purchasing, requisition and approval routes, preferred supplier lists, purchase order discipline and goods receipt, so spend is controlled without slowing the business down.

Development & growth

• As the procurement team grows, take on direct commodity responsibility, owning a portfolio of production commodities and the suppliers behind them, with support from the Senior Procurement Manager.
• Work cross-functionally with confidence, handle challenges constructively, and understand the bigger picture and constraints of the business.
• Demonstrate professionalism under pressure, remain open to feedback, and contribute to a positive, solution-oriented culture.

Qualifications & experience:

Essential

• 4+ years’ procurement experience, with demonstrable ownership of categories or spend areas rather than transactional purchasing alone.
• Experience leading sourcing activities end-to-end, from RFI/RFQ through to contract signature and supplier review.
• Strong negotiation skills, including experience in detailed quotation analysis and challenging supplier pricing where appropriate.
• Experience managing supplier contracts and renewals, and holding suppliers to agreed terms and service levels.
• Practical experience of international logistics: Incoterms, freight forwarder management, customs and import/export compliance.
• Commercial and financial awareness, with strong analytical abilities and confidence working with spend data.
• Experience with an industry standard ERP system.
• Excellent interpersonal and relationship management skills, with the ability to influence budget holders outside procurement.

Desirable

• Indirect procurement experience specifically, across software/SaaS, IT, facilities, marketing or professional services.
• Experience in a manufacturing environment, ideally automotive or another engineering-led sector.
• Experience buying production tooling or supporting capex projects.
• Experience managing freight into and out of China.
• Understanding of key cost drivers in manufacturing processes.
• CIPS qualified or working towards.
• Experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.