Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

Location: London, UK

Department: Engineering

Navan has transformed the corporate travel, payment, and expense landscape by consistently prioritizing user needs. We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) for our AI-first engineering team to drive the architecture of a next-generation corporate expense management platform. In this role, you will scale backend systems powering global commerce, payments, issuing platforms, and payment/money ledgers, while building infrastructure for automated policy management, granular admin controls, and seamless accounting system integrations.

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

• 4-6 years of experience building and scaling complex systems in fast-paced, high-growth, or large-scale environments (open to exceptional candidates with less experience).
• Java & Spring Mastery: Proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, with a solid understanding of JVM performance and optimization.
• AI Integration: Proven experience leveraging AI models and AI-driven development to build intelligent, automated features and enhance engineering productivity.
• Systems Architecture: Strong experience with distributed systems, microservices, and API design, including practical expertise with AWS or other cloud platforms.
• Product Experience: Hands-on experience developing and maintaining consumer-facing or core business products at scale.
• Ownership Mentality: A record of delivering production-quality, maintainable code, and supporting features post-release through monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborative team player able to work effectively with global, cross-functional partners.
• Technical Excellence: Commitment to engineering best practices in testing, documentation, scalability, and code quality, coupled with a passion for tackling technically demanding and customer-impacting challenges.
• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Bonus Qualifications

• Fintech or payments processing experience is a plus.
• Comfort with financial or workflow-heavy domains: expenses, payments, ERP, tax, or similarly high-stakes data.