Senior Product Manager, Spend Management (Travel & Expense)

AppZen is seeking a Senior Product Manager to shape spend management capabilities with a primary focus on travel spend across the full lifecycle. The role owns product strategy and roadmap, AI-driven controls and automation, analytics, and integrations that enable enterprises to gain real-time visibility and stronger governance over spend.

Key Responsibilities

• Define product strategy and roadmap for AppZen spend management capabilities, with travel spend as a core focus across expense, corporate card, and purchasing workflows.
• Build market understanding for travel and spend management, including competitors, TMCs, booking platforms, and customer buying criteria, to identify meaningful differentiation opportunities.
• Design pre-trip and at-spend controls to stop out-of-policy spend before it happens, including travel requests and approvals, booking policy rules (airfare class, hotel rate caps, advance-purchase rules), per diems, budgets, and spend limits.
• Connect the full trip lifecycle by matching bookings, TMC data, card transactions, and expense reports into a unified view of each trip, identifying duplicates, missing receipts, and leakage from bookings outside approved channels.
• Define how AI-driven automation extends across the spend lifecycle, including transaction categorization, policy violation flagging, anomaly detection (for example unused tickets and inflated hotel folios), and recommended actions aligned to enterprise governance needs.
• Own travel and spend analytics that provide finance and travel leaders a real-time, actionable view by traveler, department, supplier, route, and budget, supporting supplier negotiations and policy optimization.
• Drive integrations with booking tools, TMCs, card programs, ERPs, HRIS, and procurement systems so spend data flows into AppZen accurately and completely.
• Translate complex enterprise requirements, including global travel policy, multi-entity operations, VAT reclaim, duty of care, and audit, into scalable product capabilities rather than one-off implementations.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Design, Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing to move new capabilities from concept through customer adoption, and define success metrics to measure impact.

Requirements

• 5+ years of product management experience, with meaningful experience focused on corporate travel, T&E, spend management, or corporate cards.
• Hands-on experience building B2B travel or spend management products for mid-market or enterprise organizations.
• Strong understanding of the corporate travel ecosystem, including TMCs, online booking tools, GDS and supplier data, travel policy, and how travel data connects to card and expense data.
• Strong understanding of the spend lifecycle, including policy, request and approval, transaction capture, categorization, reconciliation, and reporting.
• Experience taking at least one travel or spend management product or major capability from concept through production launch.
• Familiarity with the market landscape (examples include SAP Concur, Navan, Amex GBT, Emburse, Ramp, Brex) and the ability to articulate where products win and lose.
• Experience designing for multiple personas, including finance leaders, travel managers, approvers, and travelers, with a balance of control and ease of use.
• Strong product judgment, including prioritization across competing customer needs and the ability to make build-versus-partner decisions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with effectiveness across cross-functional teams.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and bonus or variable incentive pay (role-dependent).
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Paid parental leave (eligible employees).
• 401(k) match.
• $250 annual learning and development reimbursement.
• Onsite gym access for HQ (Santa Clara) employees.
• Office perks including snacks, happy hours, and company events.

Nice to Have

• Background at a TMC, online booking tool, travel supplier, or T&E platform.
• Experience applying AI/ML to finance or travel workflows such as audit, anomaly detection, or classification.
• Experience with corporate card programs, virtual cards for travel (lodged or central travel accounts), or card-issuing platforms.
• Background in global or multi-entity travel programs (multi-currency, VAT/GST reclaim, regional policy, duty of care).
• Experience integrating with ERP, HRIS, travel, or procurement systems (examples include Oracle, SAP, Workday, NetSuite).
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

Role Details

• Location: Santa Clara, CA (onsite).
• Salary: USD 180,000 - 225,000 per year.
• Minimum experience: 5 years.