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