Job Description
Navi captures everything a pilot sees and hears and turns it into automated debrief intelligence. The platform is live at flight schools, business jet operators, and the U.S. Air Force — and demand is accelerating. You're the person who turns that demand into deployments.
About the role
This is a founding business development role. You own how Navi expands across the aviation market — airlines, charter operators, and the training centers that produce the next generation of pilots. You own the full cycle: sourcing the relationship, running the pitch, closing the deal, and standing up the deployment that follows.
Navi is deployed at Embry-Riddle, Purdue, UND, Sling Pilot Academy, and the United States Air Force. The market is wide open and the product is proven. What we need now is someone to go take it.
You won't be handed a playbook. You'll write it — and then build the team that runs it.
What you'll do
Own the full business development cycle from first contact to signed deal to live deployment — across airlines, private jet operators, and flight training centers
Build and manage a pipeline of aviation customers — identify the right targets, get in the room, and move deals to close
Run pitches and product demos for operators, training directors, and aviation executives — translating Navi's capabilities into outcomes they care about
Negotiate and close commercial agreements, then partner with the team to make every deployment a success
Represent Navi in person at customer sites, industry events, and on the road — this is a relationship business and you'll be where the customers are
Hire and build the business development team as we scale, setting the standard for how Navi sells
About you
5+ years of professional experience building and operating production infrastructure
You've dealt with user data and processing at genuine scale. Not 1,000 users. 100,000 users and 100 requests per second
Deep, hands-on AWS experience: you know the services, the failure modes, and the bill
You've built observability from scratch: monitoring, alerting, on-call, incident response
You've shipped automatic failover and fallback mechanisms and lived with them in production
You treat cost as an engineering metric and have materially reduced cloud spend at scale
Ideally you've carried infrastructure from the seed stage of a company through Series C. If you come from big tech, you've also worked early stage
Strong general backend skills; you're an engineer first, infrastructure specialist second
You write things down: documentation and runbooks that let others operate what you built
Nice to have
Familiarity with aviation systems, avionics data formats, or defense technology environments.
Why this role matters
Pilots trust their lives to the systems in front of them. When an instructor opens a debrief or a squadron reviews a sortie, the platform has to be up, fast, and right. Your work is the difference between a tool people try and a system they rely on.
What you'll get
Early-stage equity — real ownership in a category-defining company
Flight training — earn your pilot's license and sell with true domain expertise
Impact you can see — the deals you close put Navi in cockpits at airlines, flight schools, and the U.S. Air Force
A role that scales into commercial leadership as we grow
How we work
Find a way. We don't wait for permission or perfect information. Ideas come from anywhere regardless of title. Figure it out, ship it, iterate.
Creativity over control. First principles over process. We'd rather have a creative solution that's 80% right today than a perfect one next quarter.
Update fast. Come in with a hypothesis, throw it away when the data says otherwise. Ego has no place here.
Intensity with focus. We work hard because the mission demands it. Clarity on what matters is how we make that sustainable.