Founding AI Engineer

You'll be a founding AI engineer at Axle, building and shipping agentic product features that investment banks will trust with real work. This is an individual-contributor role where you'll own the full stack—from architecture and evals to guardrails and backend delivery—while setting patterns and processes for the AI team as it scales. You'll report directly to the co-founder and CIO.

What You'll Do

• Design and ship end-to-end, customer-facing LLM and agent features into production.
• Build production-ready agentic systems with robust evals, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.
• Own architecture decisions for prompting, tool use, and context management across features.
• Collaborate with product engineers on UI integration and with leadership on technical strategy.
• Establish best practices and processes that the growing AI team will follow.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years shipping production backend systems.
• Proven track record shipping LLM features (prompting, tool use, context management) into production.
• Experience working with frontier models in real-world applications.
• Deep ownership of production-ready agentic systems, including evals, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.
• Proficiency with Python APIs (Django or FastAPI) and AWS.
• Collaborative mindset, mission-focused, and stable tenure preferred.
• Based in or willing to relocate to New York.

Compensation & Benefits

• $210k–$250k base salary + equity
• 1 opening

Location

New York City, on-site five days a week.