Founding AI Engineer

**Axle** Founding AI Engineer; $210K–$250K + equity; New York (On-site)

**About Company** Axle is a New York-based corporate access platform. Investment banks use Axle to run their corporate access business, including CRM, email, event management with client portals, reporting, and AI-powered features such as email targeting and meeting allocation between public-company executives and investors. Investment banks already run on Axle.

The founders come from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and the company is backed by VCs and former senior leaders from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Citadel.

**About the Role** An early AI engineering seat at Axle, building and shipping agentic product features that large banks will trust with real work, and setting the patterns and processes for the AI team as it grows. This is an individual-contributor role with no people management, and reports to the co-founder and CIO.

**Responsibilities** - Build and ship agentic product features that large banks will trust with real work. - Make architecture decisions that balance performance, cost and maintainability. - Design the agent infrastructure: evals, guardrails, tool integrations and observability. - Build backend APIs (Python Django/FastAPI) and AWS infrastructure, working with product engineers on the UI. - Establish patterns and processes for the AI team as it grows. - Evaluate new AI tools, models and techniques for the product.

**Required Skills** A. 4+ years of production backend experience. B. Has shipped LLM-powered features to production. C. Hands-on experience with frontier models: prompting, tool use and context management. D. Has made agentic systems production-ready: evals, guardrails, observability and failure handling. E. Has owned work from concept to production on a small team.

**Logistical Info** - Location: New York, NY (Flatiron), in office 5 days a week. Core hours are 9:30am–6:30pm, with flexibility when communicated. - Compensation: $210K–$250K + equity. - **Other:** Unlimited PTO; fully covered medical, dental and vision; lunch and commute stipend; office snacks and drinks.

**Ideal Background** - Has built end-to-end AI systems and features in production, ideally with evaluations. - AI/agent experience should be in customer-facing or external product contexts, not limited to internal developer tools. - Traditional ML experience followed by a move into AI is fine. Depth of AI experience matters more than years, so the 2+ years on the posting is flexible. - Employer pedigree is not a blocker; the client looks for meaningful experience with outsized ownership. - Visa sponsorship leans no, but the client will evaluate it for the right fit. Candidates should ideally be based in New York; there may be flexibility for someone exceptional.

**Green Flags** - Collaborative and focused on the collective mission; asks questions and is curious about context.

**Red Flags** - Research-focused or deep in model development and tuning, rather than building production AI features. - AI/agent experience limited to internal developer tools, lacking experience building for external or customer-facing products. - Changes roles every 6–12 months; stability matters to the client. - Ego: focused mainly on their own impact and what they will work on, rather than the team goal; doesn't ask questions in interviews.

**Interview Process** 1. Intro call with the co-founder and CIO (~30 min). 2. Call with the CEO (~15 min). 3. Technical interview (45–60 min), such as a system design exercise. 4. In-person at the Flatiron office (~2.5 hours): work through a problem with the team and meet different people.