Circular IT Specialist
Function: IT Sustainability Centre of Excellence
Reports to: Head of Global IT Sustainability (with strong matrix alignment to Global IT Operations, Procurement, Supply Chain, Security, Legal and Compliance)
Location: India/Canada/US
Role Summary
The Circular IT Specialist is the global process owner and strategic program lead for embedding circular economy principles across the end-to-end IT hardware lifecycle. The role translates enterprise sustainability commitments into operating standards, governance controls, vendor requirements, and measurable outcomes across planning, sourcing, deployment, support, redeployment, recovery, and end-of-life disposition.
This role supports a large, multinational IT environment with distributed operations, regional regulatory complexity, and a broad supplier ecosystem. The Lead partners across IT Operations, IT Asset Management (ITAM), Procurement, Supply Chain, Finance, Information Security, Privacy, Legal, Internal Audit, and Sustainability to increase asset longevity, reduce virgin material demand, improve recovery value, strengthen chain-of-custody controls, and ensure compliant management of e-waste and cross-border asset flows.
The role also serves as the enterprise subject matter lead for circular IT governance, vendor performance, and global regulatory monitoring related to asset disposition, environmental compliance, and producer responsibility obligations.
Core Mandate
- Operationalize enterprise circular IT strategy across global IT asset lifecycle processes.
- Establish governance, standards, and controls that make reuse, refurbishment, redeployment, and compliant recovery the default path wherever feasible.
- Strengthen vendor management across ITAD, refurbishment, leasing, logistics, maintenance, and recycling partners.
- Monitor and interpret global asset, e-waste, and environmental regulations that affect IT hardware lifecycle activities, and convert those requirements into operational controls, policy updates, and vendor expectations.
- Deliver measurable business value through cost avoidance, residual value recovery, reduced waste, improved reporting quality, and lower lifecycle emissions.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy and Operating Model
- Lead the design and continuous evolution of the global circular IT asset lifecycle strategy in alignment with enterprise sustainability, IT operations, procurement, and finance objectives.
- Define the target operating model for circular asset management across device planning, acquisition, deployment, break/fix, refresh, redeployment, collection, disposition, and reporting.
- Establish enterprise standards for “circular by default” decision-making, including repair before replace, redeploy before buy new, and refurbish/resell before recycle where risk, cost, and performance requirements allow.
- Build the roadmap, policies, and implementation priorities needed to scale circular practices consistently across regions, business units, and managed service environments.
Lifecycle Governance and Process Design
- Own end-to-end lifecycle process standards for laptops, desktops, monitors, peripherals, mobile devices, network hardware, and other in-scope IT assets.
- Partner with ITAM, CMDB, endpoint engineering, service desk, field support, and regional IT teams to embed circular checkpoints into operational workflows and control points.
- Define minimum data requirements for asset traceability, disposition coding, chain of custody, reuse eligibility, residual value capture, component harvesting, and verified downstream treatment.
- Identify leakage points where assets are lost, held too long, bypass approved channels, or move to disposal prematurely, then implement corrective actions.
Vendor Management and Partner Performance
- Own the circular IT vendor governance framework for ITAD providers, refurbishers, recyclers, logistics partners, leasing firms, reverse logistics vendors, repair providers, and other lifecycle partners.
- Define vendor selection criteria, due diligence requirements, contractual controls, service-level expectations, audit rights, reporting standards, and escalation paths in partnership with Procurement, Legal, Security, and Compliance.
- Lead ongoing business reviews with strategic vendors covering reuse rates, refurbishment yields, resale recovery, on-time collections, chain-of-custody quality, data destruction assurance, downstream transparency, environmental performance, worker protections, and regulatory compliance.
- Monitor vendor certifications, permits, subcontractor controls, insurance, geographic coverage, and evidence of compliance with applicable recycling, transport, and waste-handling obligations.
- Evaluate market capabilities and emerging partner models to improve circular outcomes, cost efficiency, risk management, and reporting maturity.
Global Regulatory Monitoring and Compliance
- Establish and maintain a structured monitoring process for global asset, e-waste, waste shipment, recycling, right-to-repair, battery, producer responsibility, and related environmental regulations affecting IT asset lifecycle activities.
- Translate regulatory developments into actionable requirements for internal policies, standard operating procedures, approved vendor controls, training content, and contracting language.
- Partner with Legal, Compliance, Trade, Privacy, and Security teams to assess regulatory impacts on cross-border returns, asset transfers, storage, remarketing, recycling, and destruction practices.
- Maintain a regulatory obligations register and control framework covering jurisdiction-specific requirements, renewal deadlines, reporting obligations, permit dependencies, and evidence-retention expectations.
- Support internal audits, customer inquiries, and external assurance activities by ensuring complete documentation of material asset flows, treatment outcomes, and compliance controls.
E-Waste and Environmental Stewardship
- Defines and manages enterprise standards for e-waste minimization, responsible recycling, reuse prioritization, landfill avoidance, and downstream due diligence.
- Ensure approved disposition pathways align with environmental, health and safety, data protection, and social responsibility expectations.
- Oversee reporting and exception management for non-compliant disposal events, unaccounted assets, failed chain-of-custody controls, and material incidents involving vendors or downstream processors.
- Drive continuous improvement initiatives that increase diversion from disposal, improve component recovery, and reduce environmental impacts associated with refresh and retirement decisions.
Data, Metrics, and Reporting
- Define and govern the KPI framework for circular IT performance, including service life, refresh interval optimization, redeployment rate, repair rate, refurbishment yield, resale value recovery, e-waste intensity, landfill diversion, and asset traceability.
- Ensure ITAM, CMDB, procurement, ticketing, and vendor reporting data are reconciled and fit for management reporting, audit readiness, and sustainability disclosure needs.
- Develop executive dashboards and regular operating reviews for senior leaders across IT, sustainability, procurement, and finance.
- Provide robust data inputs to ESG, Scope 3, and enterprise sustainability reporting processes, including evidence needed for assurance.
Financial Value and Business Case Leadership
- Build and maintain business cases for lifecycle extension, circular sourcing, redeployment programs, take-back models, residual value capture, and vendor optimization.
- Quantify cost avoidance, working capital benefits, recovered value, avoided purchases, waste reduction, and lifecycle emissions impacts.
- Partner with Finance and Procurement to embed circular considerations into refresh planning, total cost of ownership analysis, and sourcing decisions.
Stakeholder Leadership and Change Enablement
- Serve as the global subject matter expert for circular IT asset lifecycle management across enterprise technology functions.
- Develop standards, playbooks, training, and communications for regional IT teams, procurement professionals, service owners, and vendor managers.
- Influence senior stakeholders in a matrixed environment and drive adoption of new controls, policies, and performance expectations without direct authority over all executing teams.
- Support executive briefings and governance forums with concise insights, risk updates, and recommendations.
Key Measures of Success
- Increase in average in-service life for key device classes relative to enterprise targets.
- Higher redeployment, repair, refurbishment, and resale recovery rates year over year.
- Reduction in e-waste volumes per managed asset and improved diversion to approved reuse and recycling channels.
- Improved vendor performance against circularity, compliance, chain-of-custody, and reporting standards.
- Timely identification and operational integration of new or changing global regulations.
- Higher data completeness and audit readiness across asset lifecycle and disposition records.
- Demonstrated financial value through cost avoidance, reduced write-offs, and increased residual value recovery.
Required Experience
- 8+ years of experience in IT asset management, end-user computing, infrastructure operations, sourcing, supply chain, sustainability, or a closely related field.
- Demonstrated leadership in designing or scaling enterprise lifecycle management programs in complex, multinational environments.
- Experience managing or governing external vendors in areas such as ITAD, refurbishment, reverse logistics, maintenance, leasing, or electronics recycling.
- Strong working knowledge of IT asset controls, chain of custody, data destruction requirements, and end-of-life operating models.
- Experience translating regulatory, audit, or policy requirements into operational processes and vendor controls.
- Experience partnering across IT, procurement, finance, legal, security, and sustainability functions.
Required Skills
- Deep expertise in circular economy practices as applied to enterprise IT hardware and related operational processes.
- Strong vendor management, contract governance, performance management, and risk assessment capability.
- Strong understanding of global e-waste, environmental compliance, and asset disposition risk considerations.
- Excellent analytical skills, including KPI development, data quality assessment, and dashboard-driven performance management.
- Familiarity with enterprise ITAM/CMDB platforms, preferably ServiceNow, and the supporting data architecture for lifecycle traceability.
- Strong communication and executive influencing skills with the ability to convert technical and regulatory detail into decisions and action.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in a large technology company, global systems integrator, managed services environment, or similarly complex multinational enterprise.
- Familiarity with sustainable procurement practices, supplier governance models, and responsible sourcing expectations for ICT hardware.
- Knowledge of recognized standards, certifications, and frameworks relevant to ITAD, recycling, environmental management, and sustainable ICT.
- Experience supporting ESG reporting, assurance processes, or sustainability metrics tied to IT hardware and Scope 3 emissions.
- Relevant certifications in ITAM, supply chain, sustainability, project management, audit, or compliance are advantageous.