Site Reliability Engineer - 2 at Navan in Palo Alto, CA

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. 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.
• Contributing to the definition and adoption of system reliability standards, including formalizing SLO/SLI frameworks, observability standards, and blameless post-mortem practices.
• Assisting in 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:

• 2+ years of progressive experience as an SRE or equivalent role.
• 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 ability to contribute to and take ownership of technical 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.