Lead Software Engineer

Lead Engineer - Customer Solutions & Technical Leadership
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

Barcelona Team
: Go, gRPC, MongoDB, Terraform, Auth0, , Datadog

Company-wide
: 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