Staff Backend Software Engineer - Flights

Navan has transformed the corporate travel, payment, and expense landscape by consistently prioritizing user needs. As a Staff Engineer in the Flights group, you will play a crucial role in architecting and delivering the next-generation flight platform, which serves as the company’s flagship product and drives the majority of our global business. Operating at high scale, you will tackle highly complex problems and collaborate closely with a broad array of stakeholders, including fellow engineers, product managers, designers, and business leaders worldwide. As part of a global, cross-functional team, you’ll contribute to a core product used by enterprises around the globe, ensuring our solutions have far-reaching impact and maintain Navan’s leadership in the market.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Large-Scale Architecture & Technical Vision: Lead the design and evolution of scalable, high-performance architectures and core services at the heart of our flagship, global platform. Set the technical direction and orchestrate cross-team initiatives to address highly complex and mission-critical challenges that shape the company’s most impactful product.
• Deliver High-Impact Solutions: Own the delivery of key product features and foundational services that power the core business. Work closely with a diverse group of stakeholders to ensure new capabilities deliver meaningful outcomes for the global customer base.
• Lead Through Influence & Mentorship: Act as a technical leader and mentor, inspiring excellence in engineering teams through best practices in system design, code quality, performance, reliability, and scalable architecture. Foster adoption of new technologies and cultivate a culture of continuous improvement.
• Ensure Operational Excellence: Champion product and system quality, including hands-on involvement in feature monitoring, performance analysis, and rapid issue resolution post-launch. Proactively plan for scalability and optimize for long-term reliability and maintainability.
• Collaborate Across Boundaries: Drive technical alignment and deep collaboration across multiple teams and domains, navigating business and technical complexity to deliver cohesive solutions for a flagship global product.

What We're Looking For:

• 9+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments (open to exceptional candidates with less experience)
• Proven technical leadership on flagship or large-scale consumer-facing products
• Expert-level proficiency with Java and Spring Boot, including JVM optimization and performance tuning
• Deep experience in system and API architecture for distributed, microservices-based systems, including hands-on work with AWS or similar cloud platforms
• Demonstrated ownership through delivery of production-quality code with robust testing, monitoring, and documentation
• Effective collaboration with global, cross-functional stakeholders
• Track record of evaluating and adopting emerging technologies
• Domain knowledge in the travel industry (flights, bookings, inventory management) is a strong plus
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience