About this role
As ClickHouse scales, we're building the technology and operating foundation Finance needs to continue to enable our rapid growth. As part of that work, we're standing up a dedicated Travel & Expense (T&E) function and are looking for a Senior Expense Specialist responsible for maturing the current processes and day-to-day operational excellence.
WHAT YOU'LL DO:
Audit, Compliance & Risk
- Own expense audit end-to-end
- Build and maintain the SOX-ready control environment for T&E, including documentation, testing support, and sign-off readiness.
- Track and reduce policy non-compliance, turning an untracked risk into a measured, managed one.
Global Policy & Program Ownership
- Enforce one global, regionally compliant T&E policy — including EOR employees — to reduce local tax and audit exposure.
- Centrally administer and optimize the ClickHouse Expense tool, Corporate Card program and system integrations to the HRIS and ERP systems.
Reimbursement & Employee Experience
- Cut international reimbursement cycle time from ~30 days to ~7 through automated routing and clear SLAs.
- Reduce the time employees spend per claim through better tooling, clearer policy, and self-service support.
- Be the primary point of contact for T&E questions, escalations, and edge cases — approval flow issues, policy setup, and offboarding coordination with the People team
Reporting, Enablement & Change Management
- Build spend dashboards, KPI tracking, and executive reporting where none exists today.
- Deliver role-based training and a global T&E champion network, and lead structured change management (ADKAR or similar) to drive adoption of new policy and tools.
- Partner with Accounting to complete the handoff of remaining T&E responsibilities.
WHAT YOU BRING ALONG:
- 4+ years of experience in travel & expense, accounts payable, or finance operations, ideally at a high-growth or Cloud software company with a distributed, multi-entity employee base.
- Hands-on ownership of Expensify, Ramp (or a comparable card/expense platform), and NetSuite integrations — you know what breaks in these systems and how to fix it at the root, not just route the ticket.
- Working knowledge of SOX controls and audit readiness for expense and card programs; experience building or maintaining automated fraud detection a plus.
- Comfort designing policy for a global, multi-entity, multi-employment-type workforce (FTE and EOR, including platforms like Deel), and translating that policy into system configuration.
- A track record of building reporting and KPI visibility from scratch — you don't wait for a dashboard to be handed to you, you build it.
- Experience running training and change management for a process or tool rollout (ADKAR or similar frameworks a plus).
- Ownership mentality: you see a broken process and fix the root cause, not just the ticket in front of you.
- Independence: you troubleshoot issues, ask clarifying questions, and propo