Engineering Manager, ACAI Travel
Occasional travel
AI for travel operations
Open for applications
AI for travel operations
1-20 employees
Open for applications
Occasional travel
1-20 employees
Company mission
To reshape the foundations of travel operations with AI-powered technologies that reflect the disruptive era we're living in.
Role
Who you are
- 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)
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Acai Travel is an AI-driven platform designed to optimise travel operations. Building on the success of their previous ventures, the founders aim to tackle inefficiencies that have worsened due to industry changes and the rising demand following the pandemic.
The platform aims to cut agencies' costs by up to half by automating routine tasks and boosting efficiency. Its approach provides agencies with insights into travel behaviour, helping optimise services and predict upcoming trends.
Early results show a 20% reduction in handling times, with the potential for valuable savings as the full suite of products is rolled out. The company has already secured substantial funding and attracted clients like Kiwi.com and lastminute.com. Acai plans to invest in enhancing its platform and double agent efficiency.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (1 round)
Nov 2024
$4m
SEED
Total funding: $4m
Company HQ
Upper West Side, New York, NY
Leadership
Riccardo Vittoria
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously co-founded 30SecondsToFly and served as the CEO until it was acquired by American Express. They also founded MatrimoniFotoRoma and worked at American Express GBT as the Global Director of Chat and AI, and as the Head of Artificial Intelligence.
Henry chen Weinstein
(Co-Founde, Investor & Chairman)Also the founder of Vine Stone Ventures and Travel Tech Nation. Previously the founder of GSC where they served as the Managing Director and Chairman, co-founder and CEO of Cockpit Innovation, and founder of Vertical Engine.
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