ACAI TRAVEL

Travel Operations

EngineeringManager

€60–75k Barcelona, Spain; London, United Kingdom; Berlin, Germany FULL TIME
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Manager candidates.

The Brief

“Engineering Manager at ACAI TRAVEL. Skills: Engineering Management, LLM / Agent Experience, Delivery Instinct. Partner with Product Lead to drive delivery. Own team's day-to-day”

What You'll Achieve.

Team hitting its commitments; Engineering function works; Scale from ~10 engineers to 30+ over 12-18 months; Grow engineers; Scale Acai from 16 people to a real engineering org

Industry & Context.

Travel Operations
Problems you'll solve

Ego-less approach to problem-solving; Deep technical curiosity; See hard problems as interesting

Eligibility Requirements

Occasional travel

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

5+ years of engineering experience, 2+ years managing engineers, Experience leading at least one team through real shipping, hiring, and performance cycles, Hands-on technical depth, Ability to write production code, Reason about distributed systems, Lead an architecture review, Production LLM / agent experience, Shipped agentic systems, RAG, or LLM-driven workflows to real users, Understand the difference between a demo and a production system (evals, latency, cost, prompt regressions, observability, cost-per-task economics), High delivery instinct, Optimize for shipping, not process, Know when to add structure and when to remove it, Can be trusted with a roadmap and a deadline, Written and verbal communication, Ability to write a technical doc, a customer-facing root cause analysis, and a hiring rubric with equal precision, Comfort with ambiguity, A bias toward the team, 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)

What You'll Do.

Partner with Product Lead to drive delivery

Own team's day-to-day

Own practices that scale the team

Manage and mentor engineering team

Review critical designs

Debug production incidents

Pair with engineers on hard problems

Build team's operating system

Establish scaling practices

Partner across the company

Own engineering side of decisions

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Partner with Product Lead; Partner with CTO; Partner with Product; Partner with Customer Success; Tight loops with Pavel (CTO)

Communication Scope

Written and verbal communication; Write technical doc; Write customer-facing root cause analysis; Write hiring rubric

Process & Methodology

Drive delivery, Delivery rhythm, Sprint cadence, Roadmap and deadline management

Full Job Description

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 http://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 http://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 tim

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