Manager, Engineering

About the Role

Navan's GOS engineering team builds the shared platform and capabilities that help teams across Navan develop, evaluate, deploy, and operate AI-powered products safely and at scale. The team focuses on reusable AI services that reduce repetitive manual workflows, along with model and provider integrations, evaluation and observability, guardrails, and a strong developer experience.

As an Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of 5-10 full-stack engineers. You will translate business and product needs into a clear technical strategy, balance near-term delivery with long-term platform investments, and create an environment where engineers can do their best work.

What You Will Do

• Lead and Develop the Team: Manage, coach, and grow a team of 5-10 engineers. Set clear expectations, hold regular one-on-ones, provide actionable feedback, and support career development.
• Set Technical Direction: Guide architecture and engineering trade-offs for shared AI services and platform capabilities, with a focus on scalability, security, reliability, and ease of adoption.
• Drive Delivery: Turn strategy into realistic roadmaps, milestones, and ownership. Manage dependencies and risks while helping the team deliver measurable product and platform outcomes.
• Gather and Clarify Requirements: Work closely with Operations, SRE, Security, Data Science, Legal, and engineering teams across Travel and Expense to understand problems, resolve ambiguity, and define clear requirements.
• Raise the Quality Bar: Establish practices for AI evaluation, observability, privacy, safety, cost management, and operational readiness. Use data and production feedback to improve the platform.
• Build Strong Partnerships: Communicate decisions and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Coordinate cross-team initiatives and create alignment around shared priorities.
• Scale the Organization: Identify staffing needs, lead hiring and onboarding, and improve engineering processes as the team and its responsibilities grow.

What We Are Looking For

• Experience: 7+ years of software engineering experience building scalable systems, including at least 2 years of direct engineering management experience.
• Technical Depth: Strong knowledge of distributed systems, APIs, data platforms, and cloud infrastructure. Experience with AI or machine learning platforms, large language model applications, or developer platforms is valuable.
• Engineering Judgment: Ability to evaluate architecture, make practical trade-offs, and guide teams through complex technical and operational decisions.
• Leadership and Execution: A record of building healthy teams, managing delivery across competing priorities, and holding a high bar for quality and ownership.
• Communication: Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical concepts, decisions, and risks to different audiences.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Good to Have

• Knowledge of the travel domain, including corporate travel, booking, servicing, or expense workflows.
• Strong product knowledge and a product-minded approach to connecting platform investments with customer and business needs.
• Experience working with varied stakeholders to gather requirements, reconcile competing needs, and turn ambiguous problems into an executable plan.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a record of simplifying complex technical or business challenges.
• Hands-on exposure to large language models, model providers, retrieval systems, evaluations, observability, or AI governance.
• Experience building shared capabilities that are adopted by multiple product and engineering teams.

Navan uses AI-assisted Automated Employment Decision Tool (Metaview) to assist with evaluating resumes against job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by human recruiters and hiring managers. 

Human oversight: Metaview does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our recruiters and hiring managers review all outputs and make the final hiring decision regarding every application. 

• Your rights: If you prefer to have your application reviewed without AI assistance, you may request a human evaluation by entering your email here. Your decision to do so will not affect how your candidacy is evaluated. 

Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about our processing of personal data, and your rights.