Engineering Manager

Description

Summary: This role involves leading and mentoring an engineering team, driving delivery, and shaping the engineering operations at a fast-growing AI travel company. Highlights: 1. Opportunity to shape engineering operations and grow into Head of Engineering. 2. Work on cutting-edge AI products rebuilding travel operations with agentic AI. 3. Join a small, senior, global team with a low ego and high standards. **Engineering Manager** ======================= **Location:** Barcelona, Spain \+ occasional travel **Team:** Engineering **Type:** Full\-time **Reports to:** CTO **About Acai Travel** --------------------- Acai Travel is rebuilding the foundations of travel operations with agentic AI. We build the post\-booking servicing layer — fare rules, schedule changes, IRROPS, refunds, waivers, traveler comms — that today still runs on thousand\-agent call centers at the world's largest airlines, OTAs, and TMCs. Our product turns those workflows into APIs, letting our customers operate faster, leaner, and with a fundamentally better traveler experience. We're backed by Nauta Capital, Amadeus Ventures, and Draper (raised $5M and soon raising a Series A), with \~20 enterprise customers including Direct Travel, TravelPerk, Kiwi.com, Etraveli, Altour, Internova, and Lufthansa City Center. Our founders previously built and sold 30SecondsToFly to American Express Global Business Travel. We're a small, global team across New York, Barcelona, and Pune. We value an ego\-less approach to problem\-solving, deep technical curiosity, and a sense of "OK\-ness" in all situations — we see hard problems as the most interesting part of the job. Explore our work at www.acaitravel.com. **About the Role** ------------------ We're hiring an Engineering Manager to partner with our Product Lead in driving the engineering team to delivery. This is the right role for an experienced manager who wants a clear path to Head of Engineering — at a company small enough that you'll shape how engineering operates here, and growing fast enough that the next step is real. Acai is built around two products that work together. **AI Travel Agent** reasons over a PNR, applies airline and agency policy, and executes the actual change in the GDS (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) — chaining composable skills like fare\-rule analysis, exchange and refund execution, and traveler communications inside a single conversation. **AI Supervisor** monitors every case across the operation in real time, classifies intent and sentiment, and routes work between human and AI agents — feeding an operations dashboard that gives heads of operations end\-to\-end visibility. The platform deploys three ways: embedded inside the customer's existing omnichannel or CRM (Zendesk, Genesys, NICE, Salesforce, Front, Outlook), as a standalone application for complex execution, or as a composable API for customers running their own agentic stack. Today the platform covers post\-booking servicing — schedule changes, cancellations, exchanges, disruptions, and general enquiries — for enterprise TMCs, OTAs, and airlines, with pre\-booking on the near roadmap. You'll own the team's day\-to\-day, the delivery rhythm, and the practices that scale us from \~10 engineers today to 30\+ over the next 12–18 months. You'll do that as a player\-coach — close enough to the code to pair on hard problems and review critical PRs, with a clear focus on growing the team that gets us there. **What You'll Do** ------------------ * **Partner with our Product Lead to drive delivery.** The two of you together are responsible for the team hitting its commitments. You own the people, the operating cadence, and the delivery rhythm; together you make the engineering function work. * **Lead and grow the team.** Manage and mentor the engineering team across Barcelona and Pune (\~10 today, 30\+ in the next 12–18 months). Run 1:1s, performance, career growth, and hiring. Set the bar for who joins. * **Stay technical.** Review critical designs, debug production incidents, and pair with engineers when the problem is hard enough to warrant it. You haven't stopped engineering — you've chosen not to be the bottleneck. * **Build the team's operating system.** Sprint cadence, code review, deployment, on\-call, incident response, and eval/regression discipline for our LLM systems — establish the practices that scale Acai from 16 people to a real engineering org. * **Partner across the company.** Tight loops with Pavel (CTO), Product, and Customer Success. You'll own the engineering side of major customer and architecture decisions, without taking on the externally\-facing exec scope — that's not what this role is for. **What We're Looking For** -------------------------- * **5\+ years of engineering experience and 2\+ years managing engineers.** You've led at least one team through real shipping, hiring, and performance cycles. * **Hands\-on technical depth.** You can still write production code, reason about distributed systems, and lead an architecture review. * **Production LLM / agent experience.** You've shipped agentic systems, RAG, or LLM\-driven workflows to real users — and you understand the difference between a demo and a production system (evals, latency, cost, prompt regressions, observability, cost\-per\-task economics). * **High delivery instinct.** You optimize for shipping, not process. You know when to add structure and when to remove it. You can be trusted with a roadmap and a deadline. * **Strong written and verbal communication.** You can write a technical doc, a customer\-facing root cause analysis, and a hiring rubric with equal precision. * **Comfort with ambiguity.** Acai is Series A. Roadmaps shift, customers change requirements, and the right answer is rarely obvious. You're energized by that. * **A bias toward the team.** You care more about the engineers you grow than the title on your own LinkedIn. * **Experience with AWS Bedrock, Anthropic / OpenAI APIs, MCP, or comparable agent infrastructure.** * **Background in multi\-tenant SaaS for enterprise customers.** * **Native\-like in English.** **Nice to Have** ---------------- * Experience in travel * Familiarity with GDS / NDC / PSS systems (Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport, Altéa, Navitaire) **Why Join Acai** ----------------- * **A real category.** Travel servicing is a multi\-billion\-dollar operational problem that AI is genuinely well\-suited to solve. We're early, and the customers are real. * **Customers from day one.** \~20 enterprise customers, including some of the largest TMCs and OTAs in the world. Your code goes into production at scale. * **Founders who've done it.** Our team has built and exited in this space before, with the network and judgment that comes with it. * **A clear path.** We're hiring an EM with the explicit expectation that the right person grows into Head of Engineering as the team scales. Meaningful equity to match. * **A team that takes the work — and each other — seriously.** Small, senior, global. Low ego, high standards, and a culture that prioritizes growth as a person, not just as an operator. *We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, as long as you have the skills. We have 13 languages, 9 nationalities and many religions — we are a diverse global team by nature, not an artificial one.* Compensation Range: €60K \- €75K