Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

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. We are committed to building the most reliable, scalable, and efficient infrastructure to ensure our services are always available when travelers need them most. With our rapid growth, we face exciting challenges ahead and are seeking a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Manager to join our team in headquarters based out of Palo Alto, California.

As a SRE Manager, you will lead a team of senior and experienced SREs, driving innovation in infrastructure design, automation, and tooling. You will spearhead the development of infrastructure services that power Navan’s systems, serving thousands of travelers daily. Your role will include partnering with development, release and productivity, and security teams to identify user needs and deliver cutting-edge solutions.

You will oversee a diverse range of systems and technologies with the goal of building autonomous, fault-tolerant, and monitored infrastructure. This infrastructure will be optimized for simplicity, performance, and uptime. Collaborating with backend and frontend engineering teams, you will ensure that our systems are scalable, reliable, and efficient. Additionally, you will lead efforts to design and implement infrastructure capable of supporting our exponential growth while maintaining the highest levels of service reliability and operational excellence. 

What You'll Do

• Lead & Mentor the SRE Team: Guide and develop a high-performing team of SREs, fostering a culture of collaboration, reliability, and continuous improvement.
• Drive Infrastructure Reliability & Automation: Collaborate with Engineering and Product teams to design and implement scalable, fault-tolerant systems. Leverage IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and microservices architectures to automate and improve infrastructure.
• Incident Management: Improve incident response processes, reduce MTTR, and proactively mitigate risks. Apply resiliency patterns to ensure systems are fault-tolerant and highly available.
• Define & Measure SLOs: Develop service-level objectives (SLOs) and KPIs to track and improve system reliability, using tools like NewRelic or DataDog for observability.
• 24x7 Production Support: Ensure system availability in a 24x7 environment, applying expertise in AWS (e.g., ECS, Lambda, DynamoDB) and database management for optimal performance.
• Optimize CI/CD Pipelines: Automate and streamline deployment workflows using tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions to ensure faster and more reliable deployments.
• Resource Management: Manage team resources, including capacity planning, hiring, and upskilling, to meet evolving business needs.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years in Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Infrastructure roles, with at least 3 years in a leadership position.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor teams, fostering a culture of collaboration and reliability.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud technologies, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), microservices architectures, deployment automation (Jenkins/GitHub Actions), and observability tools (NewRelic/DataDog).
• Strong background in designing scalable, fault-tolerant systems, improving incident response, and driving operational improvements.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams.