Engineering Manager

About Etera

Etera is building the first AI-native corporate travel platform for the GCC market — designed from the ground up for how businesses in the region actually operate. We're a lean, high-conviction team replacing legacy TMCs with autonomous agents, real-time inventory, and a product experience that doesn't feel like it was designed in 2009.

The Role

We're hiring an Engineering Manager who owns all of Etera's engineering, across all four verticals (Hotels, Flights, Restaurants, Experiences) and the platform layer beneath them. This is not a meeting-heavy management role. You spend at least 50% of your time hands-on: writing code, reviewing architecture, debugging production issues, and shipping features alongside your team. The other 50% you spend making everyone around you dramatically more productive — through hiring, technical direction, and building the agentic coding infrastructure that turns a small team into a force multiplier.

What You'll Own

• All of engineering. Every vertical, every platform service, every microservice. You set the technical direction, own the architecture decisions, and are accountable for the quality and velocity of everything that goes to production. With a team of 3–5 engineers today (scaling to 8+), you are the engineering leadership — not one layer of it.
• The agent infrastructure. Etera runs a multi-team Claude Code agent architecture (OPUS Prime) — 8 teams, ~60 specialist agents, two-tier orchestration. You own this system as a core engineering platform. You maintain agent configurations, manage prompt drift, handle tool failures, design validation gates, and ensure agent output meets the same quality bar as human-written code. If you haven't operated agent systems at this scale before, that's fine — but you need to have built with agentic coding tools extensively enough that scaling to platform-level ownership is a natural next step, not a learning cliff.
• The 10x engineering culture. You are responsible for ensuring every engineer on your team operates at maximum leverage — meaning they know how to configure, orchestrate, and validate coding agents as part of their daily workflow. You don't just use agentic tools yourself. You build the playbooks, set the standards, and coach engineers who are still thinking in manual keystrokes to think in agent-augmented systems. The goal is a team where every engineer ships like a team of three.
• Hands-on engineering. At least 50% of your time is spent writing code, reviewing PRs, designing systems, and solving hard technical problems directly. You set the engineering standard through the work you do, not just the direction you set. When a critical supplier integration breaks at 11pm, you're in the code, not waiting for a status update.
• Delivery. You break work into lean epics — problem statements, success metrics, scope boundaries. You route tasks between human engineers and agent teams based on complexity and judgment requirements. You don't write granular tickets that create the illusion of progress. You compress work aggressively and hold people to outcomes, not activity.
• Hiring. You build the team. You source, interview, evaluate, and make the call. You know the difference between a CV that was written by Claude and a career that was built by a real engineer — because you've already seen both.

Tech Stack

• Backend: TypeScript (end-to-end), 26 microservices across 4 verticals + platform, OpenSearch v3, REST + Webhook orchestration, supplier integrations (PKfare, RateHawk, Hotelbeds, Viator).
• Frontend / Mobile: React Native + Expo, TypeScript, Firebase Auth (OTP, Apple, Google).
• AI / Agent Layer: Anthropic API / Claude, Claude Code (agent teams as default runtime), Mastra (agent orchestration), Context7, LightRAG (Stage 2/3).
• Infrastructure: AWS (UAE data residency), EAS Build / TestFlight, CI/CD pipelines.

You Write Code. You Run Teams. You Build the Machine That Builds the Product.

This role lives at the intersection of three things. The strongest candidates will bring depth in all three. Realistically, we expect deep strength in the first two and genuine momentum in the third.

Dimension 1: You are a strong hands-on engineer.

You have shipped production systems in TypeScript, backend services, APIs, mobile features. You can review a database migration, debug a webhook integration, and refactor a React Native component in the same afternoon. You're in the codebase daily, and your team trusts your technical judgment because they see you make hard calls in code, not just in meetings.

Dimension 2: You have led engineering teams that ship.

You have managed 3+ engineers in a production environment. You've hired, run 1:1s, handled performance issues, and made the call on when to ship and when to hold. You know how to set direction without micromanaging, how to give feedback that actually changes behavior, and how to build a team culture where people do their best work. You've done this in a remote or distributed setting — async communication and written-first culture are your default.

Dimension 3: You are building deep fluency with agentic engineering tools.

The ideal candidate has already built or managed multi-agent coding systems in production. But we also want to hear from engineering leaders who have been using agentic tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent) extensively as power users, shipping real features through them daily — and are ready to take ownership of a platform-level agent infrastructure. What matters is that you've moved well past experimentation into genuine fluency, and that scaling agent systems excites you rather than intimidates you.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering, with at least 2 years managing a team and owning delivery.
• TypeScript across the full stack — you read, write, review, and architect in TypeScript. Non-negotiable.
• Production experience with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent) — tool calling, multi-turn management, evaluation pipelines, failure handling. Not just prompting.
• Hands-on daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent). You ship real work through them, not side experiments. Bonus if you've built systems, playbooks, or workflows that helped other engineers adopt them.
• Experience managing remote or distributed engineering teams. Written-first, async-native communication.
• Strong written English. You write specs, design docs, architectural decisions, and agent configurations. If you can't write clearly, you can't lead clearly. Arabic or German is a genuine plus.

Bonus Points

• Prior work with travel supplier APIs or GDS/NDC systems (Amadeus, Sabre, PKfare, RateHawk).
• Experience with Voice AI systems (Ultravox, Vapi, ElevenLabs) — building or managing teams that build automated voice calling.
• Familiarity with OpenSearch, vector search, or hybrid search systems.
• Experience building engineering teams from scratch in new geographies.
• Background in security auditing, compliance, or data residency requirements (UAE PDPL context).
• You've designed or maintained agent orchestration architectures — not just individual agents, but the coordination layer between them.

What We Offer

• Greenfield Ownership — You own all of engineering. Not a slice. The whole thing.
• Human + AI Engineering — You'll run one of the first hybrid engineering organizations where autonomous agents are first-class members of the team, not side tools. You'll define how this works.
• Remote-First — Work from anywhere. Async-friendly, written-first culture. Team distributed across Europe, Pakistan, and the Gulf.
• Equity + Competitive Package — Meaningful equity stake. Competitive cash. Built for the long term.
• High-Impact Market — GCC corporate travel is a $20B+ market running on legacy infrastructure. You're building the replacement.
• 50% Hands-On — This isn't a role where you slowly drift into full-time meetings. The expectation is baked in: you write code, you review code, you ship code. That's protected time, not aspirational.