Security, Privacy & GRC - Security
Vendor Risk Manager
Manager Level
Independently auditedProtects the company's systems, data, and customers from real adversaries. Owns a team, its output, its hiring, and its development.
Audited package
Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.
Your Stack (Swappable)
This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.
- GRC & Compliance
- Observability & Monitoring
- Contract Lifecycle (CLM)
- Identity & Access (SSO/IAM)
- ITSM / Service Desk
- Analytics & BI
Deliverables
- Detection rules and tuning notes
- Risk and architecture reviews
- Incident write-ups
- Control evidence packs
Responsibilities
- Own the vendor risk-tiering methodology - the model that keys assessment depth and cadence to data exposure and access - and keep it defensible and consistently applied
- Own the assessment cadence and SLAs across onboarding, periodic reassessment, and offboarding, and balance them against team capacity
- Own the risk-acceptance and exception workflow: who can accept what residual vendor risk, at what threshold, with what documentation and review date
- Lead, develop, and protect the vendor-risk analyst team; run hiring and 1:1s and grow analysts into senior reviewers and domain owners
- Own the continuous-monitoring model: which tiers earn rating/breach feeds, what triggers a reassessment, how alerts are actioned
- Own the TPRM portfolio metrics and the report to leadership - coverage, tier distribution, concentration, finding and remediation trends, exposure
- Run intake gating with Procurement so vendor risk review happens before signing, at a tiered SLA that scales with risk
- Set the DPA / contract-security requirements the program enforces, and partner with Legal/Privacy on the standard positions (Legal negotiates and signs)
The essence of this seat
The Vendor Risk Manager owns and runs the third-party / vendor-risk-management (TPRM) program and leads the team that executes it.
Signature move
Tier before you assess. On any incoming vendor, tool, renewal, or scope change, the first move is to tier it by data exposure and access - not by vendor size, brand, or who is asking - because the tier, not the noise around it, sets the assessment depth, the questionnaire, the evidence bar, the cadence, and who reviews it
What good looks like
diagnoses the backlog as a broken operating model, not a headcount shortage; installs the tiering methodology + fast-track, capacity model, intake gate, and governed acceptance workflow before asking for people; makes any headcount ask defensible in coverage/turnaround terms; frames success as vendors-per-analyst rising, not the queue drained by brute force
Decision rights
- - the vendor-tiering methodology and its thresholds, the assessment cadence and SLAs, the risk-acceptance and exception workflow (who accepts what, at what threshold, with what documentation), the continuous-monitoring model, team assignments and workload, the program's metrics and how they're reported, tool selection within budget, and the quality bar on what the team ships
Working vocabulary
What this role does
The Vendor Risk Manager owns and runs the third-party / vendor-risk-management (TPRM) program and leads the team that executes it. They own the vendor-tiering methodology, the assessment cadence and SLAs, the risk-acceptance and exception workflow, the continuous-monitoring model, the portfolio metrics, and the reporting line to leadership - and they lead, develop, and protect a team of vendor-risk analysts. This is what distinguishes the role from its neighbors: a Vendor Risk Analyst executes assessments on an assigned book of vendors; a Vendor Risk Officer is a senior IC who owns the program's depth and is the program POC but manages no people; a GRC Manager owns the whole enterprise GRC program, of which third-party risk is one domain. The Vendor Risk Manager is the layer between program strategy and hands-on execution: someone above sets enterprise risk appetite and faces the board; the analysts below tier, assess, and monitor vendors; the manager makes the third-party-risk program actually run, scale, and mature year over year. At any size the job is the same shape - a two-person function and a large team differ in vendor count and headcount, not in what the manager owns.
Best-fit customer
security teams that need consistent triage, review, and evidence quality
Need more than one role?
Buying the whole team or the complete department lowers your effective cost per role at every tier of the ladder.