Engineering Manager - Cargo.one

What's the opportunity?

Air freight carries less than 1% of world trade by volume and more than a third of it by value, around $22.7 billion of goods every single day. It's how a vaccine reaches a clinic before it spoils, how a semiconductor arrives before the production line stops, and how a retailer restocks a continent away in three days instead of five weeks. When speed is the whole point, freight flies.

Somebody has to price it, book it and move it, and that work is still done largely by hand, in inboxes and spreadsheets.

For eight years we've been building the data infrastructure underneath it: direct integrations with 75 airlines, the top ten ocean carriers and dozens of GSAs, used every day by 30,000 freight forwarders across 172 countries to hold their rates, price their business and book their freight.

In 2026 we acquired Cargofive, and cargo.one now spans air and ocean, the two modes that carry international trade. That foundation is what makes the next part possible.

In March 2026 we launched the industry's first AI-native operating system for multimodal freight: one workspace where freight teams and AI agents work side by side across rate management, procurement, quoting, booking and support. Crane Worldwide and Yusen Logistics are rolling it out across their global operations.

AI-led engineering is how we build. Engineers write specs and acceptance criteria, agents do much of the implementation, and the engineer owns the architecture, the review and what ships.

We're backed by Index Ventures, Bessemer, Creandum, Point Nine, Next47 and Lufthansa Cargo, which has been an investor in us since 2018.

What makes this role different

This is an engineering management job for a team where agents do much of the implementation. That changes the job.

When producing code gets cheaper and faster, the bottleneck moves. Throughput depends more on how well engineers define the problem, direct the agents, review what comes back and tell a plausible answer from a correct one.

You'll lead our engineers: what they ship, how good it is, how fast they move, whether the people are growing, and how quickly the team gets better at working AI-led. A lot of what engineering managers know about pacing, estimating, reviewing and measuring a team was calibrated for a different bottleneck. Working out what good looks like now is part of this job.

Today, engineers direct agents on their own work. That's where we are, but it's not the end state. We're building toward fleets of agents that work on their own inside guardrails and harnesses we design, while engineers move up to setting direction, reviewing what comes back, and owning what ships. Part of your job is helping the team get there while keeping the quality bar high.

This is also a player-coach role. You'll stay close enough to the code to keep your judgment sharp and your technical credibility current, while the engineers you lead and what they deliver remain the focus.

What we're looking for

• You get more from growing people than from being the smartest person in the room. You run real one-to-ones, not status meetings. You give hard feedback early and kindly.
• You think in systems. You can see why delivery is slipping without needing someone to tell you, and you fix the process rather than working harder inside a broken one.
• You're excited about the business. You want to know what your engineers' work is worth and what it does for the customer paying us.
• You work at eye level with Product. You co-own what gets built and when, push back on the brief, and don't treat "Product decides, Engineering delivers" as a healthy way to work.
• You want to be in the room with customers. Freight forwarders and airlines, directly. You'd rather hear the problem first-hand, and you take your engineers with you.
• English is your working language, at close to native fluency.

Qualifications & Requirements

• Experience managing engineers: hiring them, growing them, running performance honestly and shipping on a predictable cadence.
• A backend engineering background, strong architecture instincts and enough technical currency that your engineers respect your technical opinion.
• A delivery track record of specific things shipped on schedule.
• Experience building a team, assessing potential, closing candidates, and running effective onboarding.
• Genuine engagement with AI-led engineering tools.
• Judgment, low ego, and the ability to make calls with incomplete information.

Nice to have: Experience with Python 3, Flask, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Kubernetes on GCP, Vue.js, managing distributed teams across countries, or introducing new ways of working to teams.

What you'll be doing

• Own delivery: What ships, how good it is, and maintaining commitments.
• Grow the people: Perform meaningful 1-on-1s, honest performance reviews, and build career paths.
• Hire: Own the hiring bar and run recruitment loops for senior engineers.
• Partner with Product: Shape the roadmap, negotiate scope, and maintain alignment.
• Raise the team's AI capability: Spread AI best practices and help evolve workflow towards autonomous agent fleets.
• Stay technical: Spend roughly a day a week on code reviews and architectural work.
• Go to the users: Sit directly with freight forwarders and airlines.

Tech Stack & AI Practice

• Stack: Python 3, Flask, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Kubernetes on GCP, Vue.js.
• Spec-driven development: Work starts with agent-assisted specs and templates.
• Shared AI tools: Reusable AI skills, agent harnesses, CI AI code reviews, and custom Slack/Jira agents (Timber).

How we work

• Feedback is constant and direct in both directions.
• Remote-first culture with structured written communication.
• High ownership backed by data.
• Bias toward ambitious solutions over easy options.

What we offer

• Equity in cargo.one.
• Company-provided Claude Code and required AI tools.
• €650 home office budget plus choice of MacBook or Dell laptop.
• Co-working access via Desana.
• 24 paid vacation days plus public holidays and special leave.
• Two full-company offsites per year plus team trips.
• Permanent full-time employment contract.

Hiring Locations

Remote across the European timezone band in approved hiring countries: Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom. Visa support is currently available in Germany only.