Staff Software Engineer

Join Navan, a company dedicated to powering in-person connections that drive progress. As a Staff Software Engineer in our Expense Platform team, you'll lead the design and evolution of distributed systems that manage the entire expense lifecycle. You'll collaborate with engineering leaders, product managers, designers, and cross-functional stakeholders to drive technical strategy, platform scalability, and engineering excellence. Your responsibilities will include architecting and building backend microservices, driving technical strategy, designing high-performance REST APIs, and mentoring engineers.

• Architect, build, and scale backend microservices using Java and Spring Boot, and lead the design of event-driven systems leveraging Kafka, AWS SQS.
• Drive technical strategy and long-term platform architecture decisions, and own critical expense workflows including reimbursements, cash advances, mileage, per diem, and approvals.
• Mentor and guide engineers across teams through technical leadership and design reviews, and collaborate cross-functionally with product, operations, and finance teams to deliver impactful solutions.
• Strong experience with Kafka, AWS SQS, or similar messaging technologies
• Passion for building platforms that enable speed, innovation, and exceptional customer experiences
• Proven track record leading large technical initiatives and influencing engineering direction
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive technical excellence across teams
• Experience designing and operating cloud-native applications on AWS
• Strong understanding of system reliability, observability, performance optimization, and scalability
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and event-driven architectures
• Strong experience building scalable systems using Java, Spring Boot, and microservices architecture
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant backend and distributed systems expertise
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern software delivery practices
• Expertise in relational databases and data modeling (MySQL or PostgreSQL)