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cargo.one is building an AI-native operating system for multimodal freight (air and ocean), serving 30,000 freight forwarders across 172 countries. The company has integrated with 75 airlines, top ocean carriers, and dozens of GSAs. In March 2026, they launched an industry-first AI-led platform where freight teams and AI agents work side by side on rate management, procurement, quoting, booking, and support. Major customers like Crane Worldwide and Yusen Logistics are rolling out the platform globally.
This Engineering Manager role leads a team in cargo.one's AI-led engineering model, where engineers define problems, direct AI agents on implementation, review outputs, and own architecture and quality. The bottleneck has shifted from code production to problem definition, agent direction, and quality assurance. You'll own what the team ships, quality standards, delivery pace, and team growth. This is a player-coach role: you stay close to the code (~1 day/week) to maintain technical credibility while focusing on team delivery and capability.
Key responsibilities include: owning delivery commitments and quality; growing engineers through meaningful one-to-ones, honest performance conversations, and career development; hiring and setting the technical bar; partnering with Product as an equal on roadmap and scope; raising the team's AI capability and helping evolve toward autonomous agent fleets with proper guardrails; staying technical enough to review work and maintain judgment; and engaging directly with customers (freight forwarders and airlines) alongside your engineers.
The role involves helping the team transition from engineers directing agents on individual work toward fleets of agents operating autonomously within designed constraints, while engineers move to setting direction and owning outcomes. You'll work in a remote-first, distributed team across the European timezone band, with two company-wide offsites annually and regular in-person team meetings.
REQUIREMENTS (non-negotiable):
- Proven experience managing engineers: hiring, growing talent, running honest performance management, shipping on predictable cadence
- Backend engineering background with strong architecture instincts and current technical credibility that engineers respect
- Delivery track record with specific shipped projects, realistic timelines, and honest account of slips and root causes
- Experience building teams from scratch, not just running existing ones; ability to assess potential, close candidates, and set up successful first 90 days
- Genuine engagement with AI-led engineering; must use AI tools yourself and want to improve; cannot manage this way from the outside
- Sound judgment and nerve to make calls with incomplete information and own them publicly
- Low ego; takes feedback from engineers and changes mind in public
- Near-native English fluency; remote-first work is language-heavy (feedback, written decisions, difficult conversations)
- Commitment to growing people over being the smartest person in the room
- Systems thinking; can diagnose delivery issues and fix processes rather than work harder in broken systems
- Excitement about the business; understands what engineers' work is worth and can connect it to customer value
- Collaborative partnership with Product; co-owns what gets built and when; pushes back on briefs
- Desire to engage directly with customers and take engineers with you
NICE-TO-HAVE:
- Experience with Python 3, Flask, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, Kubernetes on GCP, Vue.js
- Managing distributed teams across multiple countries
- Introducing new ways of working to teams that didn't ask for them
