Founding AI Engineer

Axleaccess; New York (NY); On-site; USD 210,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited PTO

Competitive compensation with equity

Medical, dental, and vision

Job summary

Axle is hiring a hands-on backend engineer in New York (Flatiron) to embed intelligence across our platform. You will ship agentic experiences for the world’s largest banks, handling APIs, AWS infrastructure, and collaboration with product engineers to build engaging user interfaces.

The role demands 4+ years of backend work, expertise with frontier models, and ownership from conception to production in a small team. Office-based five days a week in NYC with competitive equity options.

Qualifications

• 4+ years building production backend software with strong API design.
• Experience shipping LLM-powered features and agentic systems.
• Proficiency with Python frameworks and cloud services (AWS).
• Autonomous ownership from conception to production in a small team.

Responsibilities

• Architect and ship agentic product experiences across Axle.
• Drive critical architectural decisions balancing performance and cost.
• Design harnesses behind every agent: evals, guardrails, tooling, observability.

Skills

Backend development

LLM features

Agentic systems

Python/Django/FastAPI

AWS

Job description

New York, NY (Flatiron) Full-time · In office 5 days 210k – 250k (+ Equity)

Axle is building the intelligent infrastructure for how capital moves on Wall Street.

Trillions of dollars in institutional capital get directed through a web of relationships, meetings, and decisions that still run on spreadsheets, email chains, and tools built over a decade ago. This is the layer where markets actually move, and we're at the forefront of rebuilding it.

We have replaced all of it with one platform, powered by AI agents that strip out the manual work and give bankers strategic leverage. Axle is quickly becoming the operating system for Wall Street's most important relationships.

The investment banks already running on Axle treat us as mission-critical, and we are just getting started. The problems we work on are high-stakes, data-dense, and critical to how markets function.

Our founding team blends Wall Street experience with engineering excellence, drawing on backgrounds at firms like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, AWS, and Capital One. We lived the problem firsthand and built the platform we wished existed. Our tight-knit team in NYC is backed by top-tier VCs and former leaders from JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citadel.

About the role

Embedding intelligence throughout the Axle platform is one of our highest priorities as a company, and this is the role that does it. You'll stay on the cutting edge of AI and put it to work across our product, building the magical customer experiences that the latest tools now make possible. This is a hands-on IC role; you will be shipping constantly, building ambitious solutions to ambiguous problems and turning them into world-class product.

What you'll own

• Architect and ship agentic product experiences across Axle, building products that the world's largest banks will trust with real work.
• Drive critical architectural decisions to balance performance, cost efficiency, and long-term maintainability.
• Design and own the harnesses behind every agent: evals, guardrails, tool integrations, and the observability, testing, and safeguards to know exactly what an agent did and why.
• Implement these systems directly into our backend: build APIs (Python Django/FastAPI), supporting infrastructure (AWS), and work with product engineers to build out the user interface.
• Set the groundwork for our AI org — setting up patterns, systems, and processes that will grow with the company as our engineering team grows.
• Stay on the bleeding edge of the AI ecosystem, constantly evaluating new tools, models, and techniques for what can be utilized in our product.

What you'll need

• 4+ years building production backend software, with 2+ years shipping LLM-powered features.
• Depth with frontier models: prompting, tool use, context management, and building the harnesses around them.
• Experience making agentic systems production-grade: evals, guardrails, observability, and failure handling.
• Autonomous ownership from conception to production. Small team — you take things start to finish.

Why this role at Axle

We're investing serious time, thought, and resources into building intelligence into the platform, and the surface area is enormous. You'll ship constantly, and what you ship goes straight to the most demanding customers in finance. If you want your work valued and used in production, this is the role.

What to know

We are a startup serving institutions that operate under real pressure, and sometimes that pressure lands on us. There will be times you work long hours or respond outside classic windows because a customer or a deal demands it. We balance a lot at once, and we ask everyone to carry real weight. In exchange, you get outsized ownership, a steep learning curve, and a seat at the center of how markets work. We're in our Flatiron office in New York five days a week because we build faster together.

• PTO: Unlimited
• Salary & equity: Competitive compensation with real upside
• Insurance: Medical, dental, and vision — fully covered
• Eats & commute: Lunch and commute stipend, plus office snacks and drinks

The modern standard for corporate access on Wall Street. Built from the inside out.