SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Axion is an AI-powered quality intelligence platform for manufacturers, founded in 2021 and backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Amplo, Boeing, and RTX Ventures. The company helps industrial, aerospace, consumer, and medtech manufacturers identify, investigate, and resolve quality issues while improving customer outcomes.
You will be one of the first two engineers building Axion's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team. This is a hands-on software engineering role combining direct customer engagement with substantial build time. You'll work with customers to understand their problems, scope valuable use cases, design and implement solutions, and own deployments end-to-end. You'll report to the Head of Strategic Accounts, work alongside Solutions Directors, and maintain a dotted-line relationship with Engineering. The role is based in San Francisco or New York with 25-50% travel.
Key responsibilities include: (1) Understanding and scoping customer needs by working directly with business and technical teams to identify valuable use cases, turn broad requests into focused scope with clear acceptance criteria, and determine when existing capabilities suffice versus when new software is needed; (2) Building and deploying data integrations, business logic, APIs, applications, and AI-enabled workflows iteratively with tests, clear interfaces, and agreed deployment approaches; (3) Validating solutions by reconciling outputs against source data, evaluating model behavior, working with users to confirm accuracy and business value, monitoring deployments, and establishing support models; (4) Helping scale the work by identifying patterns worth reusing across customers and establishing engineering practices and delivery standards for the FDE team.
You'll thrive in a fast-moving, high-accountability environment where you take pride in thoughtful execution. The culture emphasizes collaboration, direct communication, rapid iteration, and ownership. You're energized by ambiguity, skilled at bringing clarity, and comfortable flexing between strategy and execution. You value feedback and see collaboration as a competitive advantage. You move quickly, make decisions grounded in impact and data, and don't need constant direction.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with a track record of personally shipping and maintaining production software
- Ability to work independently across backend/application logic, data models, APIs, testing, and debugging
- Comfortable reasoning about reliability, permissions, failure cases, and tradeoffs between fast releases and maintainable systems
- Proficiency in Python and SQL
- Full-stack application development experience with TypeScript/React or comparable tools
- Experience with enterprise data and API integrations
- Applied AI or agent workflows with rigorous evaluation
- Manufacturing, quality, reliability, supply-chain, or service operations experience (particularly important if transitioning from pure software engineering)
- Strong engineering judgment and demonstrated delivery track record
- Customer ownership mindset: ability to understand workflows, translate ambiguous problems into useful solutions, communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical colleagues
- Comfort operating in small teams without fully specified backlogs
- Either prior FDE or customer-facing software engineering experience with real ownership from discovery through deployment, OR strong software engineering background with meaningful manufacturing/industrial workflow experience
