Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Navan
Austin; Dallas, US
On-site

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior SREs who thrive in fast-paced startup environments and have hands-on experience with AWS, Java, and AI/ML microservices.

Best fit for

  • Senior SREs with a passion for automating infrastructure and reducing toil.
    — “A passion for automating away everything
  • Engineers who enjoy building scalable systems in a high-growth startup.
    — “Building a fast moving, high growth service
  • Candidates with experience in AI/ML microservices and cloud platforms.
    — “Hands-on experience deploying, operating, and monitoring production-grade AI/ML microservices

Things to consider

  • Expect to work closely with multiple engineering teams across the company.
    — “work closely with development teams, release and productivity teams and security teams
  • Must be comfortable with on-call and maintaining 24x7 production systems.
    — “2+ years of experience in working on a production, 24x7 product environment

How to stand out

  • Highlight specific examples of automating toil in past roles.
    — “Finding and automating the toil out of our processes
  • Demonstrate experience with AI/LLM platforms and their infrastructure.
    — “Experience leveraging AI/LLM platforms
  • Showcase your ability to mentor junior engineers in SRE practices.
    — “Demonstrated experience mentoring and leading junior and mid-level engineers
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · TeamLevel · Senior

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • designed and implemented cloud infrastructure
  • identified reliability anti-patterns
  • automated processes
  • defined system reliability standards
Typical background
5+ years of progressive experience as a Senior SRE or DevOps Lead

Skills & requirements

Required

Site Reliability EngineeringCloud InfrastructureAutomationAI ToolsSystem Reliability Standards

Preferred

MentorshipLeadership

Stack & domain

Site Reliability EngineeringDevOpsCloud InfrastructureDeployment PipelinesInfrastructure As CodeObservabilitySystem ReliabilitySlo/sli FrameworksBlameless Post-mortemAi-assisted Developer ToolsCode Quality StandardsReal-time Architectural ValidationAi/llm PlatformsSecrets ManagementTelemetryObservability PracticesPredictive InsightsSystemic ReliabilityProblem-solvingCommunicationCollaborationOwnershipProactivityTeamworkMentorshipLeadershipTechnical OwnershipFast-pacedInnovationCuriosityProactiveResolution

About the role

Original posting from Navan

At Navan, “It’s all about the user. All of them.” We’re passionate about providing a seamless one-stop experience for business travelers, no matter how they travel, where they stay, or where they’re going.

We are constantly striving to make the most reliable and scalable systems possible to ensure that our services are available to our travelers when they need it most. With our exponential growth, we have many exciting challenges ahead and we’re looking for a passionate Site Reliability Engineer to join our team in Dallas, TX or Austin, TX. As an SRE you will design and develop tooling, automation and infrastructure services that power the Navan services, used by thousands of travelers on a daily basis.  You will work closely with development teams, release and productivity teams and security teams to identify customer needs and build innovative solutions to solve them. 

You will work across a vast array of systems and technologies, aiming to build an autonomous, monitored, fault-tolerant infrastructure that is optimized for both simplicity and uptime. You will collaborate with the backend and frontend engineering teams to ensure that product solutions are scalable, efficient, and reliable. You will design infrastructure to support our massive growth and work with the team to maintain the highest level of service.

 

What You'll Do:

Building a fast moving, high growth service. Navan is revolutionizing travel and expense services for the enterprise, and the product is evolving quickly. You are comfortable in a startup environment, enjoy seeing the product take shape, and have strong ownership of the success of your services.

Designing, implementing and operating cloud infrastructure. You’re a fit for us if you think in terms of infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines, and building the guardrails to make going fast also going safely.

Identifying reliability anti-patterns and solving them systemically. You dive deep into the data to evaluate the health of your systems, and you use it to improve visibility and reliability across the fleet of services.

Finding and automating the toil out of our processes. You’d prefer to automate it entirely, or build a tool to empower your users rather than be the gatekeeper to the tool.

Leveraging AI tools and platforms in your daily work to achieve autonomous operations, reduce toil, and improve system observability.

Defining and driving the adoption of system reliability standards, including formalizing SLO/SLI frameworks, observability standards, and blameless post-mortem practices across multiple engineering teams.

Driving the adoption of AI-assisted developer tools and platforms to increase engineering productivity, enforce code quality standards, and enable real-time architectural validation.

 

What We’re Looking For:

5+ years of progressive experience as a Senior SRE or DevOps Lead (or equivalent role)

2+ years of experience in working on a production, 24x7 product environment

Passionate about solving problems and learning new tools and technologies

Excellent communication skills working with stakeholders and domain experts across the company to design solutions to user problems

Thrive in a fast-paced environment 

Demonstrated experience mentoring and leading junior and mid-level engineers, and acting as a technical owner for cross-functional infrastructure projects.

Operate with a strong sense of ownership demonstrated through shipping production-quality code and infrastructure equipped with testing, monitoring and documentation

Hands-on operational experience with Java based applications and services including JVM profiling and performance tuning (python, Node.js and Go are a plus)

Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems in a public cloud environment (preferably AWS), using CI/CD to deploy, manage and operate production systems, focusing on tooling and automation using tools such as maven and Jenkins.

Hands-on experience with microservice architecture and related reliability and resiliency patterns such as throttling, queueing, and retries

Hands-on experience with writing Infrastructure as Code in Terraform or Cloudformation or similar tools

A passion for automating away everything, using scripting languages such as python, bash groovy (we prefer lazy engineers)

Built, using, and automating monitoring systems such as NewRelic, DataDog, SignalFX, Kibana,

Hands-on experience deploying, operating, and monitoring production-grade AI/ML microservices (e.g., RAG pipelines, agentic systems) on cloud platforms like AWS Fargate/ECS.

Experience leveraging AI/LLM platforms (e.g., Gemini, Braintrust) and managing their secrets and infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and AWS SSM.

Demonstrated ability to integrate AI-specific telemetry and advanced observability practices to enable predictive insights and systemic root-cause analysis.

Source: Navan careers

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