Staff Software Engineer, Flights
Staff Software Engineer building and scaling Navan's flagship next-generation flight platform. Lead technically while hands-on coding complex distributed systems in Java/Spring Boot/AWS; own features end-to-end with strong product focus. Requires 10+ years scaling high-growth systems.
About the job
What You’ll Do
- 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.
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments.
- A strong product mindset with genuine empathy for the user and a relentless drive to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
- A proven track record as a hands-on coder who balances high-volume, high-quality code output with technical leadership.
- In-depth experience with Java, Spring Boot, and AWS (or other cloud provider), including a deep understanding of JVM performance, optimization, and cloud architecture.
- Strong expertise in distributed systems, microservices, and API design.
- Ownership mentality with a record of delivering production-quality, maintainable code, and supporting features post-release through monitoring and troubleshooting.
- Demonstrated ability to operate comfortably in highly ambiguous environments, thinking creatively to develop and implement solutions.
- Collaborative team player able to work effectively with global, cross-functional partners.
- Commitment to engineering excellence across the software development lifecycle.
- 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.
Skills
Java, Spring Boot, AWS, Distributed Systems, Microservices, API Design, Jvm
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