Contract Negotiation & Finance Operations Manager

Key Responsibilities

• Lead contract negotiations with higher education partners across new sales agreements, renewals, and RFP responses
• Manage the full contract lifecycle: drafting, redlining, negotiation, internal approval, execution, and renewal tracking
• Turn around redlines promptly, balancing legal and business risk against deal velocity
• Make independent, pragmatic decisions on contract terms within established risk tolerances, escalating only when truly necessary
• Serve as the primary liaison with partner institutions' procurement and legal offices, guiding contracts through their internal approval processes
• Build and maintain a system for tracking key contract data (renewal dates, terms, obligations, risk flags) to support proactive account and revenue management
• Partner with the Controller and Finance team to ensure contract terms align with billing, revenue recognition, and budgeting needs
• Support billing plan setup and collections efforts as needed, ensuring contract terms are accurately reflected downstream
• Maintain and improve contract templates, playbooks, and negotiation workflows over time
• Identify process bottlenecks in the contract-to-cash workflow and recommend improvements

Qualifications Required

• Proven experience negotiating and managing contracts end-to-end, ideally in a B2B, SaaS, or higher education context
• Experience working with institutional procurement and/or legal review processes (higher education experience strongly preferred but not required)
• Strong paralegal and organizational skills, with the ability to track and report on contract data across a portfolio
• Comfort making pragmatic business judgment calls on contract terms rather than defaulting to escalation
• Exposure to billing, invoicing, or collections processes, or a strong interest in developing this skill set
• Experience with Salesforce (or similar CRM), especially for contract tracking and reporting
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to negotiate confidently with both legal and non-legal stakeholders
• A collaborative, low-ego approach—this role succeeds by removing friction, not adding process for its own sake
• Ability to manage a high volume of concurrent negotiations without losing track of details