About the role
Axle is building the first universal API 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 casees 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.
Our team is based in-person in New York City (Flatiron/NoMad).
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're backed by world class investors, including Google (Gradient Ventures), YC, and leaders from Plaid and Cox Automotive.
- 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.
About Axle.insure
Axle is the AI-native clearinghouse for insurance, building the universal API infrastructure that bridges the multi-trillion dollar insurance industry with virtually every other sector. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in a Flatiron/NoMad office in NYC (with a West Midtown Atlanta presence), Axle's mission is to completely transform the communication layer for insurance — enabling companies to verify coverage, monitor policies, and make business decisions in seconds rather than hours, while helping consumers unlock their most underutilized financial asset. The platform powers agentic workflows and RESTful API integrations for Fortune 500 clients and household names including Rocket Mortgage, Hertz, Avis, Audi, USAA, and Experian. Axle has seen exceptional traction, with revenue growing 35% quarter-over-quarter to mid-7-figures ARR and best-in-class retention — all with a lean team of ~25 people. The company is backed by a blue-chip investor roster including Y Combinator, Gradient Ventures (Google's AI fund), Base10, and angels from Plaid and Cox Automotive, and recently announced a $17.5M Series A led by Base10. Culturally, Axle is a tight-knit, in-person-first team (4 days a week in office) that values real ownership, creative problem-solving, and moving fast — everyone drives measurable impact, and early team members are building verticals from the ground up.
Required skills
Other roles at Axle.insure
Job details
Salary
$215,000 - $270,000
Equity
0.2% - 0.4%
Location
New York, NY
Experience
6+ years
Company
Funding
Total raised
$4.6M
Last stage
Seed
Investors
Founders
What happens next.
No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.
