Senior Backend Software Engineer - Flights

Navan has transformed the corporate travel, payment, and expense landscape by consistently prioritizing user needs. As a Senior Backend Software Engineer in the Flights group, you’ll play an essential part in building and scaling the next-generation flight platform, Navan’s flagship product that drives global business growth. This is a high-scale, complex environment where your work will impact customers worldwide. You’ll solve challenging problems, collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers across the globe, and contribute to a platform trusted by major enterprises.

What You’ll Do:

• Build at Scale: Design and develop robust, high-performance features and core services that support the company’s flagship product and serve a global customer base.
• Solve Complex Problems: Apply deep technical expertise and creativity to address large-scale engineering challenges, driving improvements in reliability, performance, and user experience.
• Deliver Customer-Facing Solutions: Take end-to-end ownership of features—from design and development to deployment and operational support—ensuring exceptional quality and value for users.
• Collaborate Across Teams: Work effectively as part of a global, cross-functional team, partnering with fellow engineers, product managers, designers, and business leaders to deliver impactful solutions and elevate team performance.
• Contribute to Engineering Culture: Champion best practices in code quality, scalability, documentation, monitoring, and testing, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Learn and Grow: Stay engaged with new technologies and industry trends, bringing a growth mindset and a passion for delivering elegant solutions to complex problems.

What We're Looking For:

• 6+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments (open to exceptional candidates with less experience)
• Hands-on experience developing and maintaining consumer-facing or core business products at scale
• Proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, with solid understanding of JVM performance and optimization
• Strong experience with distributed systems, micro-services, and API design, including practical expertise with AWS or other cloud platforms
• Ownership mentality with a record of delivering production-quality, maintainable code, and supporting features post-release through monitoring and troubleshooting
• Collaborative team player able to work effectively with global, cross-functional partners
• Commitment to engineering best practices in testing, documentation, scalability, and code quality
• Problem-solving mindset with a passion for tackling technically demanding and customer-impacting challenges
• Domain knowledge in the travel industry (flights, bookings, or inventory management) is a strong plus
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent hands-on experience