Senior Backend Engineer

Posted:
8/6/2025, 10:58:57 AM

Location(s):
California, United States ⋅ Palo Alto, California, United States

Experience Level(s):
Senior

Field(s):
Software Engineering

Navan has transformed the corporate travel, payment, and expense landscape by consistently prioritizing user needs. As a Senior Engineer in the Hotels group, you’ll play an essential part in building and scaling the next-generation hotel 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:

  • 5+ 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, 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 (hotels, 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

 

The posted pay range represents the anticipated low and high end of the compensation for this position and is subject to change based on business need. To determine a successful candidate’s starting pay, we carefully consider a variety of factors, including primary work location, an evaluation of the candidate’s skills and experience, market demands, and internal parity.

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.

Pay Range
$120,000$215,000 USD