---
title: 'Infrastructure Engineer at Navi AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-navi-ai-san-francisco-jc3wsjez8qm6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Infrastructure Engineer at Navi AI

- **Company:** Navi AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-08
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/navi/94449bf6-f3af-4346-a3d7-a0b5d641d2d3

## 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

Navi is live at Embry-Riddle, Purdue, UND, Sling Pilot Academy, and the United States Air Force, and usage is compounding. The next chapter is not a product problem. It is an engineering problem: serving 100,000+ users and 100 requests per second with the reliability pilots expect from everything else in their cockpit.

You'll own the AWS architecture, the reliability story, the cost curve, and the runbooks the whole team depends on.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own and scale the AWS infrastructure behind Navi's platform, from data ingest to AI pipelines to customer-facing dashboards
- Architect for real scale: user data and processing for 100,000+ users at 100 requests per second
- Build monitoring and alerting so we know a system is degrading before a customer does
- Design automatic fallback and failover mechanisms so a failure never becomes an outage
- Manage infrastructure costs and keep the cost curve flatter than the growth curve
- Own our infrastructure documentation and runbooks, and keep them current and usable
- Contribute across the backend: pipelines, APIs, and services beyond pure infrastructure

## 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

- An existing network across airlines, charter and fractional operators, or collegiate and military flight training programs
- Experience selling technical or hardware-plus-software products into regulated industries
- Background as a pilot, or deep familiarity with flight operations and training workflows
- Early-stage or founding go-to-market experience

## WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

Navi only changes aviation if it gets into cockpits. The product is built, proven, and trusted by the most demanding operators in the world. The bottleneck now is reach. This role is how Navi goes from a category-defining product to the aviation standard — and the person who owns it will shape how the entire company grows.

## 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.

## About Navi AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Navi AI builds the first purpose-built generative AI platform for aviation, providing an AI co-pilot for pilot training that turns every aircraft into a data source to deliver automated, data-driven flight debriefs and safety intelligence.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA (also has an office in Bengaluru, India)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Nikola Kostic (CEO) and Vivek Velivela (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Aviation Technology / Aerospace / Defense / Artificial Intelligence
- **Target Customers**: B2B — flight schools (Part 141), universities (aerospace programs), and military/defense organizations (U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School).
- **Mission/Purpose Statement**: To make aviation safety proactive — starting in training. Navi gives every pilot and squadron the intelligence edge they deserve.

## Products & Services
- **Navi AI Platform**: An AI-driven platform that ingests cockpit audio, aircraft telemetry, and environmental data (weather, traffic, aircraft history) to generate moment-by-moment, automated flight debriefs. It provides 40–50 key insights per flight through text, visuals, and animations. The platform is grounded in the flight school’s syllabus, POH, PHAK, and FAA regulations.
- **AI Debrief Assistant**: A context-aware conversational AI that trainee pilots can query about their performance, referencing their own flight data, standard operating procedures, and FAA regulations.
- **Automated Maneuver Analysis**: Analyzes intent, behavior, and performance for every maneuver during a flight, aligning outputs to the specific lesson or maneuver being taught.
- **Full Sortie Replay**: Provides a phase-by-phase breakdown of every training flight from engine start to shutdown.
- **Institutional Analytics (FOQA+)**: Goes beyond traditional FOQA by combining flight data with instructor interactions, environmental data, and procedural context, giving flight academies real-time visibility into trainee progression, trend analysis, and early safety pattern detection.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly available (seed-stage company).
- **Key Metric – Total Funding**: $6.7 million raised to date.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
    - **United Airlines Ventures** (strategic investor)
    - **BVVC** (lead investor)
    - **New Vista Capital**
    - **Raptor Group**
    - **I2BF**
    - **U.S. Department of War** ($1.27M SBIR Phase II grant)
    - **Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University** (strategic partner and equity stakeholder)
    - **Garmin** (technology partnership, integrated with their avionics ecosystem)
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Launched from stealth in March 2026 with $6.7M in funding.
    - First commercial deployment in September 2024 with Sling Pilot Academy; now logging 55,000+ flight hours annually at Sling.
    - Platform deployed or under evaluation at leading flight schools: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, University of North Dakota, Purdue University, Utah State University, Delta State University, and the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School.
    - Plans to hire 15 additional employees in 2026 (currently 7 employees), aggressively scaling the team.
    - Has a $1.27M SBIR Phase II contract from the U.S. Department of War to adapt its platform for the T-38 fleet at Edwards AFB.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-Mover in AI-Powered Debriefing**: No other company offers a purpose-built, commercially operational generative AI platform specifically for pilot training that automates post-flight analysis.
- **Domain-Specific LLM**: Trained on 100,000+ real flight hours, analyzing intent, behavior, and performance — not just generic AI.
- **Deep Institutional Partnerships**: Already embedded in the world's largest aerospace university (Embry-Riddle) and working with the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, providing credibility and a strong go-to-market signal.
- **Strategic Backing**: Backed by United Airlines Ventures (a direct channel to commercial aviation) and the U.S. Department of War, giving it a dual commercial and defense pathway.
- **Real-World Traction**: 55,000+ flight hours annually processed at Sling Pilot Academy, proving the product works at scale in a live training environment.

## Strategic Focus
- **Near-term**: Dominate the U.S. pilot training market by equipping every training aircraft with the Navi platform.
- **Medium-term**: Expand into commercial aviation, applying the same real-time analysis and performance intelligence to airline operations.
- **Defense**: Adapt and scale the platform for military use (U.S. Air Force), starting with the Test Pilot School and the T-38 fleet.
- **Product**: Continue to deepen the integration with Garmin avionics and expand the platform's ability to ingest more data sources.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Mission**: Work directly on making aviation safer, with a tangible product already in use by pilots and the military. The company culture emphasizes building for a critical national need ("Your country needs you").
- **Early-Stage, High-Growth**: With only 7 employees and a plan to hire 15 more, this is a true seed-stage startup where new hires will define the product, culture, and engineering practices from the ground up.
- **Engineering-Centric**: The open roles (Founding Software Engineer, ML/AI Founding Engineer, Founding Hardware Engineer, Deployment Engineer) indicate a deep focus on core product engineering and infrastructure.
- **On-Site / Hybrid**: San Francisco headquarters is primarily in-office; Bengaluru office also exists. The company favors on-site work for its core team.
- **Fast-Paced Culture**: The careers page signals an expectation of high agency: "if ten things a day sounds like a slow Tuesday - we need you."
- **Interesting Tech Stack**: Working with cockpit telemetry, audio, domain-specific LLMs, avionics integration (Garmin), and real-time data pipelines — a mix of hardware, software, and AI.
- **Founding Team Access**: Opportunity to work directly with the co-founders (Nikola Kostic, CEO; Vivek Velivela, CTO) and shape the company's technical direction.

## Sources
1. [flynavi.com](https://www.flynavi.com/)
2. [flynavi.com/careers](https://www.flynavi.com/careers)
3. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/navi-ai)
4. [flynavi.com/newsroom](https://www.flynavi.com/newsroom)
5. [prnewswire.com](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/navi-ai-emerges-from-stealth-to-accelerate-pilot-training-with-ai-302724509.html)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/navi](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/navi)

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