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Salary: USD 165,000 - 215,000 / annual
Axios is seeking a Staff Software Engineer—a senior, hands-on individual contributor—to lead architecture and delivery for core products across multiple teams using strong product-engineering and AI-native practices. This is not a people-management role, but rather a position anchored to a product area while shaping full-stack systems and technical direction across multiple teams and connected systems.
You will work with product managers, designers, engineers, and leaders to shape plans, align dependencies, resolve ambiguity, build resilient systems, and help others make better technical decisions. AI is core to how Axios builds; you'll use coding agents throughout implementation, testing, review, debugging, documentation, and operations while remaining accountable for architecture, quality, security, and product outcomes.
Key responsibilities include:
- Lead mission-critical or high-risk initiatives spanning teams and connected systems, framing problems, aligning ownership and dependencies, making tradeoffs explicit, and driving production adoption.
- Own architecture for a product area and scalable boundaries across frontend, APIs, data, and production systems; lead design reviews and establish standards within your sphere of influence.
- Own the technical direction and long-term evolution of key systems while writing and reviewing code, prototyping, debugging, leading migrations, and operating services in production.
- Identify where models, agents, retrieval, or automation create value; build reusable capabilities with measurable behavior, guardrails, and judgment about when conventional software is better.
- Improve testing, performance, observability, security, and operational readiness; anticipate systemic risks, address technical debt, and help lead resolution and learning during critical production issues.
- Mentor mid- and senior-level engineers across teams, spread systems thinking and design patterns, and build alignment through proposals, reviews, and influence without authority.
- Partner with product, design, and engineering leaders to shape the product-area roadmap, align dependencies, and connect technical investment to reader, editorial, and business outcomes.
Success looks like driving multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing through production adoption, establishing safe and repeatable AI patterns, making key systems more reliable and scalable, supporting Axios' readers and business goals, and multiplying the effectiveness of engineers across teams through mentorship and example.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Typically 7+ years in professional software development, or equivalent sustained Staff-level impact, including leading complex initiatives across multiple teams or systems.
- Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or comparable) to complete meaningful, multi-step software work.
- Ability to write clear strategies, specifications, and acceptance criteria; provide context; scope complex work; decide what to delegate; and redirect incomplete or incorrect approaches.
- Ability to review AI-generated code critically, validate assumptions, identify security, scalability, and maintainability risks, and catch plausible but wrong solutions.
- Hands-on experience building production interfaces with JavaScript or TypeScript and React, preferably with Next.js, plus judgment to guide frontend architecture across teams.
- Hands-on experience building production services and APIs; ability to shape reliable service boundaries and work effectively in or learn Go or Python.
- Experience with relational databases, SQL, schema design, transactions, and migrations.
- Experience with testing, accessibility, input validation, authentication, authorization, and web security practices.
- Ability to operate independently in ambiguity, identify high-leverage problems, align teams, make sound tradeoffs, and connect decisions to product and business goals.
- Strong communication skills to build alignment through clear proposals, communicate risks and tradeoffs across functions, and drive clarity during disagreement.
- Curiosity about changing models, tools, and practices, paired with an evidence-based approach.
PLUS (nice-to-have):
- Production experience building AI-enabled features using model APIs, structured outputs, tool/function calling, retrieval, or agent workflows.
- Experience evaluating and operating AI-enabled systems through regression tests, evaluation harnesses, tracing, feedback loops, model/prompt versioning, cost and latency monitoring, or human-review paths.
- Experience extending AI development environments through MCP servers, agent tools, repository instructions, reusable skills/plugins, custom workflows, or automated code review.
- Led a multi-team architecture, platform, migration, or modernization initiative from problem framing through production adoption.
- Owned critical systems through incidents, scaling challenges, and long-term architectural evolution.
- Drove adoption of technical standards, reusable tools, or platform capabilities across multiple teams.
- Mentored experienced engineers and helped improve technical judgment beyond immediate team.
- Experience with CMS, publishing, media, subscription, search, or other consumer-facing products.
- Production experience with Go or Python and distributed systems using gRPC, cloud infrastructure, containers, queues, CI/CD, or similar technologies.
