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Salary: USD 250,000 - 270,000 / annual
Axios, a modern media company focused on clarity and trust, is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead engineering strategy, people, and systems as the organization becomes more AI-native. This role reports to the CTO and oversees engineering across Axios products, platforms, and workflows—including the CMS, axios.com, newsletters, Local products, internal tools, and systems supporting the Newsroom and business teams.
Key Responsibilities:
- Partner with the CTO and engineering leadership to shape engineering strategy and technical direction
- Lead and develop engineering managers and senior technical leaders, fostering accountability and healthy culture while building and retaining strong talent
- Strengthen planning, delivery, quality, and reliability across teams; help teams make faster decisions and move ideas into products
- Collaborate with Product, Design, Newsroom, and business leaders to translate priorities into technical plans and align engineering capacity with company goals
- Bring strong judgment to architecture, platforms, and reliability decisions, especially when tradeoffs span multiple teams
- Own operating standards, guidelines, and practices for planning, building, testing, releasing, operating, and learning
- Establish shared benchmarks and baselines for engineering health
- Lead vendor evaluation and selection for engineering tools, platforms, and services
- Help define modern engineering leadership in an AI-native media company and shape how Axios builds, learns, and delivers at speed
What We're Looking For:
- Proven experience leading and developing engineering managers and senior technical leaders with clear expectations and direct performance management
- Experience helping teams use AI to improve how they build, test, and operate software, and to experiment with new product capabilities
- Ability to translate technical details for executives and non-technical partners while diving deep with engineers on technical and architectural questions
- Quick learner who asks the right questions, knows when to bring in expertise, and makes thoughtful tradeoff decisions
- Ideally, experience leading teams responsible for high-traffic digital products and the platforms behind them
- Strong vision for how AI and technology will change engineering practices, product development, platforms, and internal workflows
