
Procurement Lead at Parallel Web Systems (San Francisco, CA / Palo Alto, CA)
Parallel Web Systems· San Francisco, CA / Palo Alto, CA·
Role details
Job description
About us
Parallel is a web infrastructure company. Our products are used by leading businesses in sales, marketing, insurance, and coding to build best-in-class AI agents with flexible and powerful programmatic access to the web.
We've raised $230 million from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Khosla Ventures, First Round, and Terrain to build the web for AIs. We're currently valued at $2 billion and we're forming a world-class team of engineers, designers, marketers, sellers, researchers, and operational experts to achieve our mission.
Job: Be a frugal, strategic, and and hard negotiator for Parallel. You will build and lead Parallel's Procurement function as we scale a generational AI infrastructure company. You’ll lead our compute negotiations, one of largest cost centers, structuring commitments with cloud and infrastructure providers that keep pace with fast, hard-to-forecast growth. You’ll own vendor procurement across software, services, and infrastructure, from intake to signature. You’ll also own content and data partnership payouts while are key to enhancing our product performance. You’ll partner closely with finance, accounting, legal, and engineering, and you’ll help hire the team as the function grows.
You: You’ve been the first procurement lead at a high-growth tech company and built the function from nothing. You’ve personally negotiated large, complex deals across cloud, AI, data, and software, and you can point to what you won. You understand compute economics: reserved versus on-demand, commit sizing, and the levers that keep things flexible. You’ve owned the full flow from request to contract to payment, so accounting stays clean. You use AI tools to move faster with a lean team. Teams come to you early because you make forecasting, and buying easier, not harder.
Life at Parallel Our team works fully in-person, between our Palo Alto HQ and San Francisco office. We’re a flat, talent-dense organization dedicated to solving technical and creative problems.
We seek like-minded individuals who share our passion for applying science, creativity, and consistency to big and complex problems with equally big outcomes. These are our values:
- Own customer impact: It’s on us to ensure real-world outcomes for our customers.
- Obsess over craft: Perfect every detail because quality compounds.
- Accelerate change: Ship fast, adapt faster, and move frontier ideas into production.
- Create win-wins: Creatively turn trade-offs into upside.
- Make high-conviction bets: Try and fail. But succeed an unfair amount.
Compensation & benefits
- Competitive salary
- Generous equity
- Visa sponsorships
- 401K plans
- Daily lunch & office snacks
- Dinner at the office
- Unlimited vacation
- Caltrain pass reimbursement
Why work at Parallel Web Systems
- Culture: Described as “fully in-person,” with locations in Palo Alto and San Francisco. The company emphasizes serendipity, flat organization, and a talent-dense environment where employees can learn from each other daily parallel.ai/careers.
- Engineering Focus: The entire engineering team is based in Palo Alto. Roles span back-end/API, front-end, infrastructure/scaling, model training, retrieval/indexing, and search ranking. They are “AI-first,” building and dogfooding frontier software parallel.ai/careers.
- Values: Own customer impact, obsess over craft, accelerate change, create win-wins, and make high-conviction bets parallel.ai/careers.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, equity options, 401K plans, daily lunches & snacks, unlimited vacation, Caltrain pass, and visa sponsorship parallel.ai/careers.
- Team Background: Talent is drawn from top companies including Meta, Patreon, Amazon Web Services, Waymo, Cognition, and Andreessen Horowitz. Alumni go on to firms like Google DeepMind, Kleiner Perkins, and other AI startups linkedin.com.