Staff Backend Software Engineer - Flights

At Navan, “It’s all about the user. All of them.” We’re passionate about providing a seamless one-stop experience for business travelers, no matter how they travel, where they stay, or where they’re going. Our engineers work closely with product managers, designers, and data scientists to build innovative tools and services that provide a frictionless, efficient, and enjoyable traveler experience.

This is a unique opportunity that combines the hyper-growth, fast-paced environment of a startup, with the perks, opportunity size, and impact of an established company. Our teams are at the forefront of the next-generation of modern airline retailing. 

As a Staff 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.

As a technical leader and contributor on the Flights team, you will partner closely with other engineers to drive change and improve systems and developer experience. Although you will be at one of our highest levels of seniority, all individual contributors are expected to be hands-on and contribute code.

What You’ll Do:

• Build at Scale: Act as a prolific individual contributor while providing technical leadership and mentorship to engineers across the team. Design and develop robust, high-performance architecture and services that support our flagship product globally.
• Champion a Product Mindset: Cultivate a deep understanding of our customers' needs and strive for excellence in the customer experience, translating user insights into seamless, high-performance technical realities.
• Solve Complex and Ambiguous Problems: Apply deep technical expertise and creativity to turn highly ambiguous problem spaces into clear, actionable technical solutions, addressing large-scale engineering challenges, and driving improvements in reliability, performance, and user experience.
• Deliver End-to-End Business Impact: Own critical features end-to-end. Collaborate closely with product managers and designers, ship high-impact features, monitor their operational health, and ensure key technical decisions directly drive exceptional quality, user value, and positive business outcomes.
• 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.
• Elevate Engineering Culture: Champion engineering excellence, setting the standard for code quality, scalability, documentation, and testing. Mentor team members to foster continuous growth and technical mastery.

What We're Looking For:

• 10+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments.
• A strong product mindset with genuine empathy for the user and a relentless drive to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
• A proven track record as a hands-on coder who balances high-volume, high-quality code output with technical leadership.
• In-depth experience with Java, Spring Boot, and AWS (or other cloud provider), including a deep understanding of JVM performance, optimization, and cloud architecture.
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and API design.
• Ownership mentality with a record of delivering production-quality, maintainable code, and supporting features post-release through monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Demonstrated ability to operate comfortably in highly ambiguous environments, thinking creatively to develop and implement solutions.
• Collaborative team player able to work effectively with global, cross-functional partners.
• Commitment to engineering excellence across the software development lifecycle.
• 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.