Staff Engineer

Axle; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Full benefits

401k

Unlimited PTO

Annual offsite

Job summary

Axle is building the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance. As a Staff Engineer, you’ll guide our core platform that combines complex data structuring (via LLM inference) with durable data pipelines and agentic workflows, impacting customers across asset lending and business contracts.

We value creative problem solving, real-world impact, and cutting-edge AI research, with strong compensation, equity, and full benefits.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building complex, high-scale systems.
• Strong sense for API design and service interfaces.
• Experience deploying AI/ML systems to production.
• Ability to own large areas of product and engineering.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain durable, scalable systems processing millions of transactions per month.
• Define API-driven interfaces for turn-key data platform usage.
• Design novel AI-led techniques to improve data integration accuracy and reliability.
• Own significant portions of the product as an early team member with customer interaction.
• Collaborate with the CTO and founding members to grow the team.

Skills

Systems design

API design

Observability

AI/ML in prod

Startup velocity

Job description

Axle is building the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, unlocking access to a core financial data primitive that impacts almost every industry and transaction. Our mission is to completely transform the communication layer for insurance.

As a Staff Engineer, you’ll be directly involved in guiding our core platform that pairs complex data structuring (using LLM inference) with durable data acquisition pipelines (using agentic workflows). The work you do will impact every customer we work with, across foundational use cases such as asset lending and business contracting.

We’re looking for individuals who think creatively about problems, push for real-world customer impact (not only theory), keep up to date on the latest in AI research, and are excited about helping financial data reach full connectivity.

Why you should consider joining

• We have a product loved by customers and being used in mission-critical flows at Fortune 500 banks and leading brands like Hertz, Avis, and Audi.

• We're punching well above our weight, supporting customer and revenue metrics with half the team size of other startups — everyone joining at this stage will have outsized impact.

• We're tackling unsolved problems at the intersection of complex data structuring, agentic workflows, and financial risk analysis.

• We've grown revenue 5x this year to multiple $millions ARR, with our growth continuing to accelerate.

• We care deeply about our team and provide great compensation and equity, full benefits & 401k, unlimited time-off, and plan an annual team offsite!

We're a lean team, and our customer base is growing too fast for us to keep up. We're looking for talented engineers to join our early team ahead of our next round and execute on an ambitious roadmap.

Impact

We're powering mission-critical insurance data extraction, validation, and verification at companies where if we get things wrong, there are real world impacts (e.g., denied lending applications, modified compliance statuses, etc.).

Here's a few of the complex problems you’ll be working on:

• Building industry-first evals for insurance data extractors and transformers

• Integrating context and understanding to standardize high-variability data points

• Understanding data management and hierarchy across overlapping data ingestors

• Orchestrating self-healing agents that automatically get better over time

Role

• Build, and maintain, durable, scalable systems capable of processing millions of complex transactions per month.

• Define the interfaces (API-driven) to enable turn-key usage of our data platform across varied applications.

• Design novel AI-led techniques for increasing the accuracy and reliability of our data integrations.

• Have complete ownership over the work you do — as an early team member, you’ll have the opportunity to truly own large areas of product and engineering and have direct relationship with customers.

• Work directly with the CTO and other founding members to help build out our team.

What would set you up for success

• 6+ years of experience (or equivalent) building complex systems in high-scale environments.

• A perspective when approaching common system patterns (e.g., state machines, event brokers, etc.) as well as API design and maintenance.

• A desire to define ways to increase observability, simplicity, and velocity across our engineering processes.

• Experience deploying AI/ML systems into production environments.

• Ability to take abstract projects end-to-end, operating with high agency.

• You've been at high-growth startups and know what "high velocity” looks like.

• Experience in fintech or data aggregation is a plus.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Axle

Axle is an equal opportunity workplace—we are dedicated to equal employment opportunities regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or Veteran status. We believe in actively building a team rich in diverse backgrounds, experiences, and opinions to better allow our employees, products, and community to thrive.

Axle is the AI-native clearinghouse for property and casualty insurance. Our infrastructure and AI agents automate complex insurance workflows for third parties including verification, monitoring, and policy updates. Read more about our vision: https://www.axle.insure/blog/announcing-our-17-5m-series-a-led-by-base10

We are backed by leading investors including Base10, Y Combinator, and Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund) and angels from companies like Plaid and Cox Automotive.

Our team is in-person 4 days a week in our Flatiron/NoMad office in NYC and our West Midtown office in Atlanta.