Partnership Manager

This role can be based from any of our Store Support Centres (London, Coventry or Manchester), with the rest of your time working from home. There are no set office days, with office attendance and store visits expected around once a week on average to support collaboration and business needs.

Why join us

Help shape how Sainsbury’s gets the most from one of its most strategically important supplier partnerships. In this newly created role within the Partnerships team, you’ll connect people, services and priorities across a partnership spanning technology, outsourced business operations, HR, Finance, Data, Commercial and more. With ways of working still taking shape, you’ll have the opportunity to build practical approaches that improve performance, unlock value and support innovation, including making the most of emerging capabilities such as AI. Together, this will help propel our Next Level strategy forward.

What you'll do

You’ll manage defined areas of the partnership, bringing together our supplier, Technology, Procurement and business service owners to turn shared priorities and insights into action. Your focus will be on joining up activity across teams, establishing effective governance and making sure commitments, risks and improvement actions are understood and followed through. You’ll work at the point where supplier relationships, operational performance and business change meet, helping people understand what change means for them, building engagement and bringing stakeholders with us as new ways of working take shape.

Day to day, you’ll review service performance, investigate issues, prepare insight for partnership forums and work with senior stakeholders to agree what needs to happen next. You’ll help translate contractual commitments and business cases into measurable outcomes, using operational and financial data to challenge constructively and identify opportunities for improvement. You’ll help turn change into practical action, working across teams to build understanding, overcome challenges and maintain momentum. There won’t be a ready-made playbook for everything, so you’ll help create the structure needed to keep delivery moving while supporting longer-term efficiency, innovation and value.

Who you are

You bring experience of managing supplier partnerships, accounts, services or commercial relationships within a complex, matrix organisation. You know how to build trust while holding people to agreed commitments, influence across organisational boundaries and explain performance, risks and recommendations clearly. You can connect the detail of service delivery and contractual obligations with wider business priorities, drawing on an understanding of the services and market involved.

You’re comfortable working through ambiguity, asking challenging questions and turning incomplete information into practical next steps. You take ownership, remain adaptable when priorities change and approach difficult conversations with respect. Experience in technology, outsourced business operations, managed services or transformation would be useful, as would working with offshore delivery models. Your ability to manage complex relationships, improve performance and bring teams together matters most.

Essential criteria

• Proven experience managing supplier partnerships, accounts, services or commercial relationships within a complex matrix organisation, coordinating delivery across multiple functions.
• Demonstrable experience managing governance, service measures, performance reporting and improvement plans, with evidence of following actions through to measurable outcomes.
• Evidence of influencing stakeholders across organisational boundaries, including senior stakeholders, and using negotiation and constructive challenge to resolve relationship or delivery issues.
• Demonstrable commercial understanding of contractual obligations, cost drivers, value opportunities and risk.
• Evidence of interpreting operational, financial and performance data to recommend action and prioritise delivery where information is incomplete or priorities compete.

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you here at Sainsbury’s. For a FTSE business, we move incredibly fast. When we’re not leading projects, we’re supporting teams across the wider group to achieve their goals. And here, you can see the impact of your work as soon as you walk into a store, giving you a real sense of purpose and responsibility. Better still, the team around you will listen to your ideas and opinions, and you’ll have every chance to try something new. The scale and complexity of our business mean there’s always something new to learn, and we’ll support you every step of the way. We’re trusted to get on with it. So get ready to make things happen.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).