Program Manager, Contingent Workforce & Vendor Management (Project Based) in Logan, Utah at Autonomous Solutions, Inc

This is a project-based employee role supporting the contracts that drive our initial development phase of our autonomous vehicle platforms. Development phases of this nature typically span up to project completion (typically 2-4 years), though scope and duration are driven by business needs.

The Program Manager, Contingent Workforce & Vendor Management will serve as the central point of accountability for ASI’s contingent workforce program: building visibility into contractor population, spend, and agency performance; managing agency relationships and rate/markup negotiations; owning the contractor lifecycle and escalation process; ensuring correct worker classification and co-employment compliance; and partnering with business leaders on workforce strategy.

This role reports to the HR Director, works closely with the COO and serves as the day-to-day program owner supporting the Contingent Workforce Governance Committee (HR, Recruiting, Finance/Accounting, business/Engineering leadership, and Legal/Procurement as appropriate). This position performs the majority of the program's contractual, analytical, and compliance work, and supervises administrative tasks performed by an Administrative Coordinator who handles day-to-day onboarding, offboarding, and routine administrative coordination with contingent staff and agency partners. The Program Manager is accountable for ASI's exposure to co-employment, worker misclassification, and export-control risk across the non-employee population.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Support the Governance Committee's monthly operating cadence with data, recommendations, and follow-through on action items.
• Build and maintain a single source of truth for contingent workforce data; deliver a regular dashboard to the Governance Committee covering spend, headcount, markups/rates, contract expirations, agency performance, turnover, extensions, conversions, and cost savings.
• Maintain the master agency list, contracts/MSAs/SOWs, rate cards, and markups; conduct regular agency business reviews.
• Track contractor headcount and spend by agency; identify renegotiation, consolidation, and volume-leverage opportunities as relationships scale.
• Establish and monitor agency performance standards; identify and manage underperforming vendors.
• Maintain visibility with every contractor: agency, manager, department, location, start/end dates, rate, and tenure.
• Own the escalation path for contractor performance issues, coordinating across HR, Recruiting, and agency partners.
• Oversee contract extensions, renewals, and offboarding/conversion processes.
• Partner with business leaders on workforce planning, including contract labor vs. FTE decisions and FTE conversion opportunities.
• Evaluate rate consistency across similar roles and identify cost-saving and negotiation opportunities.
• Partner with the administrative agency candidate-flow coordination function (housed in Recruiting) to ensure smooth day-to-day support without owning that administrative work directly.
• Own ASI's co-employment boundary: publish manager guidance defining what ASI may and may not direct, train every manager who engages contingent labor, and monitor for practices that create joint-employer exposure.
• Ensure correct worker classification across agency W-2, independent contractor, and SOW/services engagements; commission and act on an independent classification baseline with Legal and Finance, and drive remediation where required.
• Determine, with Procurement and Legal, whether statement-of-work and 1099 spend falls within program scope, and govern it accordingly.
• Verify agency compliance with I-9/E-Verify, wage-and-hour, workers' compensation, and applicable Utah and federal employment law; secure annual attestations and right-to-audit terms in every MSA.
• Partner with Security and Export Compliance to clear contingent workers on ITAR/EAR-controlled programs before access is granted, including deemed-export review for foreign-person workers.
• Recommend and administer an assignment tenure threshold with a review-or-convert trigger and a documented exception path.
• Define contingent worker injury reporting and OSHA recordkeeping responsibility with EHS and counsel, and confirm site safety orientation is delivered before deployment.
• Ensure customer-site requirements and contract flow-downs are written into agency MSAs and verified before deployment to customer and field locations.
• Maintain policy, SOPs, and an audit-ready contract repository — current MSA, rate card, insurance certificate, flow-downs, and IP assignment — sufficient to answer an internal, customer, or government audit.

ESSENTIAL EDUCATION, WORK EXPERIENCE, JOB SKILLS

• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA or equivalent advanced degree preferred.
• 8–10+ years of progressive experience in contract management, vendor/procurement management, HR, Talent Acquisition, or People Operations, including experience designing and scaling a function or program from the ground up.
• Demonstrated experience managing external agency, staffing, or vendor relationships, including contracts, rates, and performance gained either through direct program ownership or through senior Talent Acquisition/HR leadership work with agency partners.
• Track record serving as a strategic advisor and thought partner to C-suite or senior executive leadership, including on organizational design, workforce strategy, or change management.
• Advanced proficiency in Excel and comfort working with spend, rate, and headcount data to build executive-level recommendations; experience with VMS/ATS or reporting tools a plus.
• Strong cross-functional relationship-management skills able to work credibly with executives, HR, Finance, business leaders, and external agency partners at the same time.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, matrixed environments where ownership isn’t always clearly defined.
• Working knowledge of contingent labor compliance and risk: co-employment, worker classification, wage and hour, I-9/E-Verify, and tenure management.
• Experience supervising, directing, or mentoring administrative or coordinator-level staff.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

• Contingent labor spend versus plan, and realized savings from rate negotiation and supplier consolidation, validated by Finance.
• Percentage of contingent engagements sourced through the governed program.
• Percentage of agency spend under a current, standardized MSA and rate card.
• Supplier fill rate, submittal quality, and scorecard/QBR completion by tier.
• Zero material audit findings on worker classification, co-employment, or access control.
• Percentage of assignments with access revoked within one business day of end date.
• Requisition cycle time, and contingent-to-permanent conversion rate.