Navan Interview Questions — Page 1

Navan·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Navan engineering interview, one question about debugging that felt more open-ended than I expected. Not a lot of other context to share but the question itself had some depth to it.

Walk me through how you debug a problem: reproducing it, narrowing it down, and fixing it. How do you decide whether to patch it quickly or dig for the root cause?

“I went with a real example from a previous job where a race condition was causing intermittent failures in prod.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026

System design round at Navan for a software engineer role. The prompt was about modeling auxiliary comments on reservations, which sounds contained until you get to the batch update extension and start realizing how many edge cases you glossed over.

Design an object-oriented model and high-level system architecture for storing auxiliary comments on a reservation, where regular users can add or edit comments on their own bookings and admins can update comments on any booking.
How would you design a batch update mechanism that lets admins apply a comment change to thousands of reservations at once?
What assumptions would you state upfront about comment history, auditability, and expected scale before diving into the design?

“I started with the data model, which felt natural.”

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Navan·Software Engineer·Onsite - Cross-functional / Panel

Apr 2026

Interviewed at Navan for what felt like a senior engineering or tech lead role. One question, but it was meaty enough that it took up most of the conversation.

When working alongside a PM and a designer, how do you make sure a feature actually ships complete, with edge cases handled, design held to spec, and the timeline not blown? What processes or documents do you actually use?

“This one tripped me up a bit because I started listing rituals like dev kickoffs and QA sign-off and it started sounding like I was reading from a project management textbook.”

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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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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·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·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·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·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·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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