Manager, Compensation in London

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 utilisation 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 modelling 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.