Engineering Manager — AI Travel Platform, Growth Path to Head of Eng
1 day ago
Barcelona
ph3Engineering Manager /h3pstrongLocation: /strong Barcelona, Spain + occasional travelbrstrongTeam: /strong EngineeringbrstrongType: /strong Full-timebrstrongReports to: /strong CTO /ph3About Acai Travel /h3pAcai 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. /ppWe'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, a Kiwi.com /a, Etraveli, Altour, Internova, and Lufthansa City Center. Our founders previously built and sold 30SecondsToFly to American Express Global Business Travel. /ppWe'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. /ppExplore our work at . /ph3About the Role /h3pWe'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. /ppAcai is built around two products that work together. strongAI Travel Agent /strong 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. strongAI Supervisor /strong 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. /ppToday 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. /ppYou'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. /ph3What You'll Do /h3ullipstrongPartner with our Product Lead to drive delivery. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongLead and grow the team. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongStay technical. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongBuild the team's operating system. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongPartner across the company. /strong 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. /p /li /ulh3What We're Looking For /h3ullipstrong5+ years of engineering experience and 2+ years managing engineers. /strong You've led at least one team through real shipping, hiring, and performance cycles. /p /lilipstrongHands-on technical depth. /strong You can still write production code, reason about distributed systems, and lead an architecture review. /p /lilipstrongProduction LLM / agent experience. /strong 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). /p /lilipstrongHigh delivery instinct. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongStrong written and verbal communication. /strong You can write a technical doc, a customer-facing root cause analysis, and a hiring rubric with equal precision. /p /lilipstrongComfort with ambiguity. /strong Acai is Series A. Roadmaps shift, customers change requirements, and the right answer is rarely obvious. You're energized by that. /p /lilipstrongA bias toward the team. /strong You care more about the engineers you grow than the title on your own LinkedIn. /p /lilipstrongExperience with AWS Bedrock, Anthropic / OpenAI APIs, MCP, or comparable agent infrastructure. /strong /p /lilipstrongBackground in multi-tenant SaaS for enterprise customers. /strong /p /lilipstrongNative-like in English. /strong /p /li /ulh3Nice to Have /h3ullipExperience in travel /p /lilipFamiliarity with GDS / NDC / PSS systems (Sabre, Amadeus, Travelport, Altéa, Navitaire) /p /li /ulh3Why Join Acai /h3ullipstrongA real category. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongCustomers from day one. /strong ~20 enterprise customers, including some of the largest TMCs and OTAs in the world. Your code goes into production at scale. /p /lilipstrongFounders who've done it. /strong Our team has built and exited in this space before, with the network and judgment that comes with it. /p /lilipstrongA clear path. /strong 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. /p /lilipstrongA team that takes the work — and each other — seriously. /strong Small, senior, global. Low ego, high standards, and a culture that prioritizes growth as a person, not just as an operator. /p /li /ulpemWe 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. /em /p /p #J-18808-Ljbffr
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