Navan Interview Questions & Experiences

Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Did a technical phone screen for a software engineer role at Navan. The whole session was basically one problem that looked simple on the surface but had a real constraint twist that forced you to think carefully about space complexity and update order.

Implement a Pascal's Triangle-style DP problem where dp[i][j] = dp[i-1][j-1] + dp[i-1][j], but the 2D array causes an out-of-memory error. Solve it using O(N) space with a 1D rolling array, and explain why you must update right-to-left instead of left-to-right.

“I started with the 2D approach out of habit and the interviewer stopped me pretty quickly to say it would OOM.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Async video screen for a frontend role at Navan, about 15 minutes total. You record your answers and the team reviews them later, which is a weird format to prepare for but not as bad as I expected once I got going.

Give a brief overview of your career so far.
Walk us through your experience as a frontend engineer.
What project are you most proud of, and what were the main challenges you ran into?
How do you approach debugging when something breaks?
How do you work with a PM and designer to make sure a feature actually gets shipped end to end?
Describe your experience with Angular and how you've used it to build scalable SaaS applications.
Are you able to commute to the Palo Alto office four days a week, including two Fridays per month, on an ongoing basis?

“Standard opener.”

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Navan·Frontend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Navan frontend screen, pretty much a deep dive into your engineering background. One main question that branches out into a few different directions depending on what you say.

Walk us through your frontend engineering background: what frameworks and stacks you've shipped with, the biggest UI or feature you owned end-to-end, and the engineering challenges that were most specific to frontend work like performance, cross-browser issues, accessibility, or state management.

“This is one of those questions that sounds like a warmup but isn't.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Navan coding screen for a software engineer role. One algorithmic problem, pretty focused, felt like a straightforward session but the edge case clarification mid-problem was a bit of a curveball.

Given an array of positive prices and a discount percentage, apply the discount only to the single most expensive item (first occurrence if tied), then return the floor of the total sum.

“My first instinct was to sort, which would've blown the O(n) requirement.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Jun 2026

Behavioral screen at Navan, just one question but it had a lot of sub-parts packed in.

Tell me about a project you're most proud of. What did you specifically contribute, what was the hardest challenge you faced, and how did you work through it? What came out of it?

“This felt like four questions stapled together and I kind of lost the thread halfway through.”

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Navan·Product Manager·Recruiter / HR Screen

May 2026

Quick screen at Navan, basically just a walk me through your background opener. Nothing technical, nothing tricky, just the standard intro question to kick things off.

Walk me through your background, highlighting your most relevant roles and what you've been focused on recently. Keep it to 2-3 minutes.

“Classic opener and I still fumbled the pacing.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

Navan system design round focused entirely on OOD for a booking comments feature. Pretty deep dive, more nuanced than I expected for what sounds like a simple CRUD problem.

Design a system that supports storing auxiliary comments (like 'room should be quiet') during a booking flow. Comments can be attached to a specific booking or to a recurring entity like a room or listing. Regular users can add comments to their own bookings; admins can update existing comments. How would you model the entities, handle permissions, manage persistence, and support efficient bulk updates by admins across many bookings or rooms at once?

“I started with the entity model and got through the basics fine, polymorphic association between Comment and either a Booking or a Room/Listing.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Interviewed for a software engineer role at Navan and got a data structures problem that looked simple on the surface but had a few wrinkles worth thinking through. Clean problem, reasonable expectations.

Design an in-memory key-value store that supports time-based lookups. It should handle set(key, value, timestamp) and get(key, timestamp), where get returns the value at the largest stored timestamp that doesn't exceed the queried one.

“My first instinct was a plain hashmap and I started going that direction before realizing get() needed something smarter than a linear scan.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Navan coding screen, got a time-based key-value store problem. Pretty classic but the binary search part tripped me up more than I expected.

Design a time-based key-value store that supports a set operation storing a key-value pair with a timestamp, and a get operation returning the value for the largest stored timestamp that does not exceed a given query timestamp.

“I knew roughly where this was going once they said 'timestamp' but I fumbled the get logic for a bit.”

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Navan·Frontend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a frontend role at Navan and the whole thing was basically a deep dive into Angular architecture for SaaS products. One long technical conversation covering a lot of ground, felt more like a system design session than a typical frontend screen.

Walk me through how you've used Angular to build and scale a SaaS web application, including the patterns you relied on and how the architecture held up as the product grew.

“This was basically the whole interview compressed into one question.”

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