Senior Backend Software Engineer, Flights
Navan · New York City · $113,400–$252,000 (stated in the posting)
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
For roles with on-target-earnings (OTE), the pay range includes both base salary and target incentive compensation. Target incentive compensation for some roles may include a ramping draw period. Compensation is higher for those who exceed targets. Candidates may receive more information from the recruiter.
Navan uses AI-assisted Automated Employment Decision Tool (Metaview) to assist with evaluating resumes against job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by human recruiters and hiring managers.
Human oversight: Metaview does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our recruiters and hiring managers review all outputs and make the final hiring decision regarding every application.
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Your rights: If you prefer to have your application reviewed without AI assistance, you may request a human evaluation by entering your email here. Your decision to do so will not affect how your candidacy is evaluated.