Contracts Manager

The Contracts Manager will lead QAD’s global day-to-day contract operations and serve as a trusted, solution-minded partner to Sales, Deal Desk, Customer Success, Procurement, Finance, and Professional Services. Positioned ideally in the Eastern Time Zone to extend operational coverage hours across global teams, this role offers a significant opportunity for a forward-thinking contracts leader to transform QAD’s contracting processes and how we manage those contracts, help build a robust contract operations framework, and lead AI-first contracting initiatives across a high-growth software company.What You'll Do:Lead Global Contract Operations: Establish and manage the Legal intake queue, triaging requests by type, priority, and risk. Prepare and route customer, partner, and vendor agreements for signature, adhering to delegation of authority policies and service levels.Review and Negotiate Commercial Agreements: Review, draft, and negotiate NDAs, customer agreements and CSAs, vendor agreements, SOWs, amendments, and partner documents. Utilize AI-assisted review tools and playbooks, escalating high-risk deviations with clear recommendations.Drive AI-First Contracting: Lead the shift toward AI-enabled contract workflows by identifying, testing, and scaling use cases for automated intake, review, and routine query responses. Refine and maintain AI playbooks and self-service resources.Scale and Improve Contract Operations: Continuously improve how contract work gets done by refining intake and routing workflows as necessary, maintain standard templates, serve as a power user/admin for legal technology (including CLM implementation), and maintain an accurate, transaction-ready contract repository.Cross-Functional Enablement & Risk Protection: Advise business teams on contractual interpretation, support Customer Success and renewals requests, license compliance and audit requests, partner with Finance on collection/dispute workflows and contract rights reviews, and triage legal notices to resolution.  Build self-services resources and training that reduce routine requests to Legal.