Lead Engineer - Customer Solutions \& Technical Leadership
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Location: Barcelona, Spain )
Team: Engineering
Type: Full-time
About Acai Travel
Acai Travel is revolutionizing the travel industry with cutting-edge AI agentic solutions for leading Airlines, OTAs, and TMCs. We're rebuilding travel with agentic software.
Our founders previously sold an AI company to American Express GBT—value for your equity is guaranteed! We've grown from 3 clients ($15K MRR) to 10 clients ($80K MRR) at 30% monthly growth.
Our culture is grounded in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism principles, fostering ego-less problem-solving and emotional stillness. We consider the company a playground to become better individuals—you will be transformed into a more empowered, joyful person.
About the Role
We're looking for an exceptional Lead Engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep technical expertise and customer engagement. This is a 50/50 role: you'll spend half your time architecting and building solutions in Go, and the other half working directly with customers—understanding their needs, designing technical solutions, and ensuring successful implementations.
This isn't your typical engineering role. You'll be the technical face of Acai to our customers, translating complex business problems into elegant technical solutions while writing production code yourself. You'll bridge the gap between what customers need and what our platform can deliver.
What Makes You Exceptional
Extreme Ownership: You challenge specs, suggest alternatives, and drive ideas to completion. You own customer success end-to-end.
Product Obsession: You ask "why?" relentlessly and dive into user behavior, business metrics, and customer feedback to understand real problems.
Optimistic Collaboration: You make everyone—engineers AND customers—more excited about building. You help ideas get off the ground.
Authentic Communication: You build great relationships with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Customers love working with you.
Craft Excellence: Joy comes from the craft itself. You love both solving customer problems and writing beautiful code.
Customer Empathy: You genuinely care about customer success and can translate their pain points into technical requirements.
What You'll Do
Lead Customer Solutions (50%)
Work directly with customers to understand their business needs and technical requirements
Design technical solutions that leverage our AI platform to solve customer problems
Lead discovery sessions, architecture discussions, and technical workshops with customers
Become a trusted technical advisor to our key accounts
Translate customer feedback into product improvements and new features
Support customer implementations and troubleshoot complex integration issues
Travel occasionally to customer sites for strategic engagements
Build Technical Solutions (50%)
Design and implement scalable Go services (gRPC, MongoDB) based on customer needs
Work across AI workflows, automation logic, and integrations
Make architecture decisions that balance customer requirements with platform scalability
Own features end-to-end—from customer discovery to production deployment
Ensure code quality through testing, code reviews, and best practices
Collaborate with product and engineering teams to prioritize customer-driven features
What We're Looking For
Technical Foundation
5+ years of backend engineering experience with distributed systems
Strong proficiency in Go (or similar systems languages like Rust, C++, Java)
Experience with gRPC, MongoDB, and modern cloud platforms
Deep understanding of system design, APIs, and integration patterns
Proven track record of building production systems that customers rely on
Customer-Facing Excellence
Experience working directly with enterprise customers or technical stakeholders
Ability to lead technical discovery sessions and solution design workshops
Strong presentation and communication skills—you can explain complex technical concepts simply
Track record of translating customer requirements into technical solutions
Comfortable with pre-sales technical discussions and proof-of-concept work
Experience with Travel Industry systems (GDS, APIs, integrations) is a major plus
Product-Minded Engineering
Deep interest in business models, user behavior, and success metrics
Track record of challenging specifications and bringing product ideas
Experience working with product managers, designers, and customer success teams
Ability to make pragmatic tradeoffs between customer needs and technical constraints
Exceptional Qualities
Self-directed with a "yes, and" mentality toward customer requests
Authentic communicator who builds customer confidence and trust
Intrinsically motivated by customer success and building great products
Optimistic problem-solver who generates enthusiasm in customer conversations
Comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities based on customer needs
Our Stack
Proprietary Agentic AI, Go, gRPC, MongoDB, Terraform, Auth0, TypeScript/Next.js, Datadog, AI-driven products on LLMs, distributed systems, event-driven architecture.
What Success Looks Like
3 months: Build deep relationships with 2-3 key customers, ship meaningful features based on customer feedback, establish yourself as a trusted technical advisor
6 months: Own the technical relationship with our top accounts, deliver customer-driven solutions that improve retention and expansion, contribute significantly to product roadmap
12 months: Be the go-to technical leader for customer solutions, drive measurable customer success outcomes, influence product strategy based on customer insights
Why Join Acai
Proven Growth: 30% monthly growth, founders sold previous company to AmEx GBT
Dual Impact: Directly influence both customer success and technical excellence
Personal Growth: Zen/Buddhist culture focused on self-awareness and empowerment. You will be transformed into a more empowered, joyful person.
Meaningful Equity: Significant ownership in category-defining startup
Strategic Travel: Visit customer sites worldwide—airlines, OTAs, TMCs across the globe. Frequent travel all over the world to conferences, customers, world-class off-sites
Learn from the Best: Work with ex-directors from successful startups (ManoMano, AmEx GBT) and deep travel industry experts
Reporting Structure
Reports to: CTO (based in Barcelona)
Collaboration: Work closely with Product, Customer Success, Sales, and engineering teams in Barcelona, New York, and Pune
Location \& Benefits
Location: Barcelona, Spain - In-person at Cloudworks, Sagrada Familia with a lot of flexibility.
Travel: Regular customer visits for strategic engagements worldwide
Benefits: Competitive salary + significant equity, private health insurance, office perks (fresh fruits, free drinks, after-work events), epic company off-sites
We welcome exceptional engineers from all backgrounds. You don't need fancy companies on your resume—we love builders who've worked closely with customers and understand that great code is only valuable if it solves real problems. What matters is your ability to build deep customer relationships, your technical craftsmanship, and your drive to make customers successful.
Ready to lead customer solutions and build something exceptional?
Compensation Range: €60K - €80K