Staff Backend Software Engineer (Flights)

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Parental leave
• Commuter benefits
• Healthcare
• Flexible Vacation
• Health and Wellness
• Fuel for Connection
• Pet Friendly
• IATAN (travel-related discounts)
• 401k (retirement plan)
• Connectivity Allowance
• Learning & Development

• Ownership mentality with a record of delivering production-quality, maintainable code, and supporting features post-release through monitoring and troubleshooting
• Problem-solving mindset with a passion for tackling technically demanding and customer-impacting challenges
• A strong product mindset with genuine empathy for the user and a relentless drive to deliver an exceptional customer experience
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and API design
• Domain knowledge in the travel industry (flights, bookings, or inventory management) is a strong plus
• A proven track record as a hands-on coder who balances high-volume, high-quality code output with technical leadership
• 10+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments
• Demonstrated ability to operate comfortably in highly ambiguous environments, thinking creatively to develop and implement solutions
• In-depth experience with Java, Spring Boot, and AWS (or other cloud provider), including a deep understanding of JVM performance, optimization, and cloud architecture
• Commitment to engineering excellence across the software development lifecycle
• Collaborative team player able to work effectively with global, cross-functional partners
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent hands-on experience