Manager, Compensation

Navan is a newly public company managing global compensation for 4k employees. You’ll be joining a lean, high-impact team at an inflection point, building infrastructure and processes and owning work that directly shapes how we attract, retain and pay our people.

What you'll do:

• Job architecture and salary structures. Design, maintain, and administer salary structures and job architecture that scale with headcount growth across engineering, sales, and corporate functions.
• Lead market pricing and survey management. Translate our compensation survey  data into clear pay positioning recommendations for a fast-moving tech talent market. Own the annual benchmarking cycle from data submission through final analysis. 
• People Success (PSBP) partner and advocate. Serve as the embedded comp expert for People Partners across client groups, advising on complex pay decisions and building the shared fluency that reduces one-off comp questions over time. 
• Job Offer and Talent Acquisition partnership. Partner closely with Talent on job offer construction across high-volume, ensuring alignment to pay bands and internal equity.
• Compensation planning cycles. Own the operational execution of merit, promotion, and equity refresh cycles, including tooling, manager communication, and analysis.
• Workday compensation optimisation. Support the implementation, configuration, and ongoing optimisation of the Workday Compensation module, ensuring effective system utilisation and data integrity.
• Equity program support. Administer equity program processes including grant tracking & approvals. Contribute to employee-facing education materials so employees can clearly understand how their equity works. 
• Compensation analysis and reporting. Expand our analytics capability that makes compensation data accessible and actionable for People, Finance and leadership on demand: pay equity analysis, market gap reporting, budget utilization trends. Maintain a working knowledge of federal/state legislation that may affect compensation policies.
• Pay transparency and regulatory readiness. Support the development and implementation of pay transparency practices, ensuring alignment with evolving global legislation and internal communication frameworks.
• Documentation and process playbooks. Own our Total Rewards documentation, policies, and process guides, and supporting materials.

What we're looking for:

Required

• 5+ years of compensation experience, including at least some exposure to leading others, with demonstrated ownership of job architecture, salary structures, and market pricing, preferably in a public company. 
• Hands-on experience with major compensation surveys (like Radford) and comfort navigating compensation management systems. 
• Experience conducting an enterprise-wide compensation review cycle. 
• Strong Excel / Google Sheets modeling skills; able to build tools and analyses without relying on pre-packaged outputs.
• Ability to communicate compensation concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including hiring managers, employees, and executives.
• Experience supporting globally distributed employee populations.
• Experience working with global compensation frameworks, including multi-country regulatory considerations and pay transparency requirements.
• Strong analytical and modelling capability, with experience building compensation models to support business decision-making.
• Ability to provide supervisory oversight and mentorship as required by departmental workload; may transition between high-level individual contribution and direct people management based on business priorities

Preferred

• Experience at a high-growth SaaS or fintech company, ideally with exposure to both pre- and post-IPO compensation environments.
• Exposure to executive compensation, including benchmarking and proxy data sources.
• CCP certification or in progress.
• Track record of building or improving compensation processes from scratch rather than inheriting a mature infrastructure.

What success looks like in year one

• Salary structures and job architecture are documented, market-aligned, and actively used by Talent Acquisition and PSBPs across all functions and geographies.
• Annual compensation planning cycle runs on time with clean data, manager-ready tooling, and minimal escalations.
• The TR team has a credible compensation analytics capability, available on demand.
• Equity administration and communication materials are in place and employees can clearly articulate how their grants work
• You are viewed as the internal go-to resource for compensation questions across People, HR, Finance, and management
• Pay transparency frameworks are established and aligned with evolving regulatory requirements (including EU Pay Transparency Directive), with clear reporting and communication in place.