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.