Senior Outsource Manager

About 2K

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Job Summary

The Senior Outsource Manager is accountable for the end-to-end management of external development partnerships for the studio. In this role, you will own and drive the external development pipeline, ensuring that our partners deliver assets and content on schedule, within scope, and at the highest quality standard. You will establish and evolve production practices that seamlessly integrate external partner contributions with our internal development teams. Through your leadership, you will manage dependencies, track progress across multiple content pipelines, and facilitate clear communication between internal stakeholders and external vendors. This role is crucial for ensuring our external content production remains efficient, predictable, and aligned with the creative vision of our projects. Reporting to the Director of External Development and partnering closely with Art, Production, and other project leaders, you will be a key driver in scaling our content creation capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage relationships with external partners, serving as the primary point of contact through the entire lifecycle, including onboarding, offboarding, contracts, and invoices.
• Negotiate and align vendor scope, capacity, cost, and delivery expectations with project goals and budget.
• Establish and maintain a clear communication cadence with vendor Production/Project Managers and leadership, ensuring alignment and clarity.
• Handle all administrative aspects of partnerships in collaboration with 2k Legal, Finance, and IT.
• Build and manage vendor production schedules across all content pipelines, ensuring clear milestones, staffing plans, and allocation of hours.
• Track deliverables, monitor milestone health, and proactively identify and flag risks related to schedule, budget, or scope drift.
• Drive the continuous improvement of vendor workflows, documentation, and toolchains to increase efficiency and quality.
• Report on vendor KPIs, cost efficiency, and delivery trends to studio and project leadership.
• Hold external partners accountable for meeting deadlines, quality standards, and budgetary requirements.
• Coordinate closely with internal discipline leads, producers and OS Supervisors to define creative briefs, style guides, and asset libraries for external partners.
• Work with OS supervisors to ensure external work is consistently reviewed against studio standards and quality bars.
• Ensure the seamless integration of assets and content from external partners into the internal development pipeline.
• Serve as the key communication bridge, running the external cadence with vendor PMs and escalating critical issues internally.
• Mentor other producers and OS Supervisors on best practices for external development.
• Help evolve the studio’s production craft by proposing and testing new approaches, methodologies.