Procurement and Spend Manager
Job description
The AI orchestration of your wildest imagination.
n8n is the open workflow orchestration platform built for the new era of AI. We give technical teams the freedom of code with the speed of no-code, so they can automate faster, smarter, and without limits. Backed by a fiercely inventive community and 500+ builder-approved integrations, we're changing the way people bring systems together and scale ideas for impact.
Since our founding in 2019, we've grown into a diverse team of over 260 - working across Europe and the US, connected by a shared builder spirit and with our centre of gravity in Berlin. Along the way, we've:
- Cultivated a community of more than 650,000 active developers and builders
- Earned 190K+ GitHub stars, making us one of the world's Top 40 most popular projects
- Backed by top investors, from Sequoia's first German seed to our SAP's recent strategic investment - bringing us to a $5.2bn valuation
That's the company we've built. Now we'd love to see what you can build. If you're applying, try n8n out - whether you're technical or not - and share a screenshot of your first workflow with us. The easiest place to start is here: app.n8n.cloud/register http://app.n8n.cloud/register.
We're in a defining moment of an incredible journey. Come and build with us.
🎯 Your main goal will be to build and own n8n's procurement and spend-management function, ensuring every vendor relationship delivers strong value, every commitment is well governed, and our processes scale through AI and automation.
You'll achieve this by creating a disciplined, transparent, and automation-first approach to sourcing, vendor management, contracts, and company-wide spend:
BUILD STRATEGIC SOURCING & NEGOTIATION
- Own the vendor-request intake and selection process from structured business need through evaluation and signed agreement.
- Lead commercial negotiations for our largest and most strategic spend, including consumption-based cloud and AI commitments.
- Create category strategies, leadership briefing materials, and negotiation playbooks that help teams secure strong outcomes across cloud, AI, SaaS, services, and contractors.
MANAGE THE VENDOR & SAAS LIFECYCLE
- Own the vendor portfolio across onboarding, performance management, renewal, consolidation, and offboarding.
- Reduce SaaS sprawl by tracking adoption, identifying overlapping or underused tools, and taking deliberate action on renewals.
- Surface shadow IT and shadow AI while applying robust evaluation standards to AI vendors, APIs, data handling, access controls, and consumption-based spend.
OWN CONTRACT LIFECYCLE & THIRD-PARTY RISK
- Manage the contract lifecycle from intake and drafting support through commercial negotiation, execution, central storage, and obligation tracking.
- Independently negotiate commercial terms while routing legal redlining, security, privacy, and specialist reviews to the appropriate owners.
- Maintain proactive renewal calendars, consistent vendor-risk processes, and traceable records that remain audit-ready across all entities.
CREATE SPEND GOVERNANCE & VISIBILITY
- Govern outbound spend across vendors, travel, expenses, corporate cards, and contractors through clear policies and approval thresholds.
- Partner with FP&A to manage vendor spend against OpEx budgets and feed accurate actuals into financial planning.
- Build automated approvals, alerts, and always-on reporting, with particular visibility into consumption-based cloud and AI costs.
REQUIREMENTS
MUST-HAVES
- 🚀 Function-building experience: You've meaningfully built or rebuilt a procurement or spend-management function rather than only operating an established one.
- 🛒 Procurement expertise: You have deep experience across sourcing, vendor management, category strategy, and contracts, ideally within a fast-scaling technology or SaaS company.
- 🤝 Commercial negotiation: You independently review and negotiate commercial agreements and have secured strong terms on significant commitments, ideally including consumption-based cloud or AI spend.
- 💸 Spend-ownership mindset: You treat company money with care and bring discipline to how spend is approved, committed, monitored, and reported.
- 🧩 Operator mindset: You turn ambiguous, manual workflows into clear, scalable processes and take ownership from initial problem through measurable outcome.
- 🤖 AI-native working style: You instinctively use AI and automation to remove repetitive work and are excited to build your own processes using n8n.
NICE-TO-HAVES
- 🛠️ Hands-on automation: You've built workflows with n8n and can use the platform to scale your impact without relying on additional headcount.
- 📊 Audit and compliance exposure: You've supported audit, SOX, or GoBD readiness and understand the controls and documentation required to remain audit-ready.
- 🔐 Third-party risk familiarity: You've managed vendor security assessments, DPAs, privacy