Engineering Manager

Navan has transformed the corporate travel, payment, and expense landscape by consistently prioritizing user needs. As an Engineering Manager 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.

You will be the hands-on leader for the Flight Content team and will push the boundaries of great business travel products. The Flight Content team owns the critical backend components that drive the flight shopping experience and are relied upon by all Navan Products and Travelers. As a leader and manager of the area, you will be partnering with product management and stakeholders to develop a vision and roadmap for your product area. In addition to being a strong and execution oriented leader, the role requires you to exercise your technical chops and scale the architecture across a variety of systems, make the system highly reliable, dive into product metrics and come up with insights to improve the overall product.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead & Mentor: Manage, coach, and grow a team of 3-5 talented engineers. Set performance goals, conduct regular 1:1s, and provide actionable feedback.
• Technical Leadership: Guide architectural decisions and trade-offs for our stack (Java/Spring Boot, AWS), ensuring the team delivers scalable, secure, and highly available services.
• 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.
• Process Optimization: Maintain and improve agile development processes. Organize schedules, track deliverables, check work for technical accuracy, and ensure robust operational reliability.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Effectively communicate and coordinate work with Product Management, Design and other managers and staff across the organization to seamlessly integrate complex, cross-team features.
• Team Building: Identify staffing needs, lead hiring efforts, and onboard top-tier engineering talent to scale your team.
• 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.

What We're Looking For:

• 3+ years of experience building and leading high performing teams of at least 6 engineers
• 8+ 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
• Strong leadership skills to get things done by challenging the status quo and making decisions in a fast-moving, rapidly changing environment
• Strong technical background in at least one domain with ability to make long-term architectural decisions and trade-offs.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills working with stakeholders and domain experts across the company to design solutions to user problems
• Proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, with solid understanding of JVM performance and optimization
• Strong experience with distributed systems, microservices, 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