Skip to content
CV Rocket
Get started
How it worksThe enginePricingBlogContactSign in

Open nowPosted 14 days agoWe saw it 107 min after it went up

Staff Software Engineer

Axios36 open roles

Pay
$165,000 – $215,000 a year
Where
Remote
Work mode
Remote
Get the CV for this job

From $25 per CV, paid once. No subscription.

Your applicationOpen nowStaff Software EngineerAxios · Remote

  1. YouYes, apply to this one.

  2. CV RocketCV written for this posting.

  3. 25 readersRecruiter, hiring manager, skeptic. Round after round.

  4. CV RocketApplied on Axios's own form.

The reply lands in your private mailbox

3×more interviews than doing it yourself with ChatGPT.

The clock on this job

Early applications get read.

8.2% of postings close within 7 days. Measured by our own scanner across the market. Axios postings stay open a median of 22 days.

Share of postings closed within
  1. 1.8%1 day
  2. 3.6%3 days
  3. 8.2%7 days
  4. 15.2%14 days
  5. 34.0%30 days
This job: posted 14 days ago

Axios median: 22 days open

The posting

1 big thing: Axios is a growth-focused media company helping people get smarter, faster, on what matters. We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer—a senior, hands-on individual contributor—to lead architecture and delivery for Axios’ core products across multiple teams using strong product-engineering and AI-native practices.

Why it matters: Axios delivers clear, trustworthy news to millions of readers. You’ll be anchored to a product area while shaping full-stack systems and technical direction across multiple teams and connected systems. This is not a people-management role.

AI is core to how we build. You’ll use coding agents throughout implementation, testing, review, debugging, documentation, and operations while remaining accountable for architecture, quality, security, and product outcomes. Staff impact comes from sustained scope, judgment, and results—not tool use alone.

You’ll work with product managers, designers, engineers, and leaders to shape plans, align dependencies, resolve ambiguity, build resilient systems, and help others make better technical decisions.

Responsibilities:

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll lead reliable product and platform work across Axios’ frontend and backend systems. You’ll remain hands-on while driving multi-quarter initiatives, improving technical coherence, and using agentic practices to accelerate delivery. Key responsibilities include:

  • Cross-team technical leadership: Lead mission-critical or high-risk initiatives spanning teams and connected systems. Frame problems, align ownership and dependencies, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive production adoption.
  • Architecture and design: Own architecture for a product area and scalable boundaries across frontend, APIs, data, and production systems. Lead design reviews and establish standards within your sphere of influence.
  • Hands-on system ownership: Own the technical direction and long-term evolution of key systems while writing and reviewing code, prototyping, debugging, leading migrations, and operating services in production.
  • AI-enabled product and engineering: Identify where models, agents, retrieval, or automation create value. Build reusable capabilities with measurable behavior, guardrails, and judgment about when conventional software is better.
  • Quality, reliability, and incident leadership: Improve testing, performance, observability, security, and operational readiness. Anticipate systemic risks, address technical debt, and help lead resolution and learning during critical production issues.
  • Technical leadership and mentorship: Mentor mid- and senior-level engineers across teams, spread systems thinking and design patterns, and build alignment through proposals, reviews, and influence without authority.
  • Product and technical strategy: Partner with product, design, and engineering leaders to shape the product-area roadmap, align dependencies, and connect technical investment to reader, editorial, and business outcomes.

Skills:

The ideal candidate is a staff-level engineer with sustained multi-team impact, deep expertise in a relevant domain, broad systems thinking, and a commitment to user experience, reliability, scalability, maintainable code, and effective AI-enabled practice. You should have:

  • Experience: Typically 7+ years in professional software development, or equivalent sustained Staff-level impact, including leading complex initiatives across multiple teams or systems.
  • AI-native development: Hands-on experience using agentic coding tools—such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or comparable tools—to complete meaningful, multi-step software work, rather than only generating snippets or using autocomplete.
  • Agent direction and context: Ability to write clear strategies, specifications, and acceptance criteria; provide context; scope complex work; decide what to delegate; and redirect incomplete or incorrect approaches.
  • Verification and engineering judgment: Ability to review AI-generated code critically, validate assumptions, identify security, scalability, and maintainability risks, and catch plausible but wrong solutions. You understand that AI raises the importance of sound architecture, testing, and human judgment.
  • Frontend development: Hands-on experience building production interfaces with JavaScript or TypeScript and React, preferably with Next.js, plus judgment to guide frontend architecture across teams.
  • Backend development: Hands-on experience building production services and APIs. Our backend systems use Go and Python, and you should be able to shape reliable service boundaries and work effectively in or learn either language.
  • Data fundamentals: Experience with relational databases, SQL, schema design, transactions, and migrations.
  • Quality and security: Experience with testing, accessibility, input validation, authentication, authorization, and web security practices, plus the ability to raise standards across teams.
  • Engineering judgment: Ability to operate independently in ambiguity, identify high-leverage problems, align teams, make sound tradeoffs, and connect decisions to product and business goals—including when AI is not the right tool.
  • Communication: Ability to build alignment through clear proposals and reasoning, communicate risks and tradeoffs across functions, and drive clarity during disagreement.
  • Continuous learning: Curiosity about changing models, tools, and practices, paired with an evidence-based approach. You share useful patterns, identify what fails, and make others more effective.

We’ll be even more excited if you have:

  • Experience building production AI-enabled features using model APIs, structured outputs, tool or function calling, retrieval, or agent workflows.
  • Experience evaluating and operating AI-enabled systems through regression tests, evaluation harnesses, tracing, feedback loops, model or prompt versioning, cost and latency monitoring, or human-review paths.
  • Experience extending AI development environments through MCP servers, agent tools, repository instructions, reusable skills or plugins, custom workflows, or automated code review.
  • Led a multi-team architecture, platform, migration, or modernization initiative from problem framing through production adoption.
  • Owned critical systems through incidents, scaling challenges, and long-term architectural evolution.
  • Drove adoption of technical standards, reusable tools, or platform capabilities across multiple teams.
  • Mentored experienced engineers and helped improve technical judgment beyond your immediate team.
  • Experience with CMS, publishing, media, subscription, search, or other consumer-facing products.
  • Production experience with Go or Python and distributed systems using gRPC, cloud infrastructure, containers, queues, CI/CD, or similar technologies.

What success looks like:

  • Cross-team delivery: You drive multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing through production adoption, aligning dependencies and ownership to produce durable outcomes.
  • Engineering leverage: Teams deliver more effectively because of the standards, tools, architecture, documentation, and context you create. You establish safe, repeatable AI patterns where they add value.
  • System health: Key systems become more reliable, scalable, secure, observable, and easier to change. You reduce systemic risk and improve incident prevention and response.
  • Product-area impact: Your decisions support Axios’ readers, products, editorial workflows, and business goals within the teams and systems you influence.
  • Organizational technical leadership: Engineers across teams make better decisions through your mentorship, proposals, reviews, and example. You remain a hands-on IC who multiplies others’ effectiveness.

Starting salary for this role is in the range of $165,000 - $215,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits. Axios' compensation philosophy takes into account the cost of labor differentials across the country. Because this is a remote-optional job posting, this salary range takes into account all possible locations within the United States, but candidates will only be eligible for the salary range for their location.

Axios is committed to embracing artificial intelligence as a core part of how we work. All team members are expected to actively develop AI literacy and use AI tools to enhance their productivity, creativity, and efficiency. We invest in ongoing learning to ensure every employee is equipped to responsibly and effectively integrate AI into their daily workflows.

What Axios brings to the table besides salary:

  • 401(k) with employer match
  • Robust PPO and High Deductible health insurance options on the Blue Cross Blue Shield network
  • Employer Health Savings Account (HSA) contribution for the high deductible health plan option
  • Dental and vision coverage
  • Primary caregiver 12-week paid leave
  • Birth-givers will have an additional 6-8 weeks depending on type of delivery, for a total of 18-20 weeks continuous leave
  • Generous vacation policy, plus holidays
  • One mental health day per quarter
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • $100 monthly work-from-home stipend
  • Tele-mental health services through Headspace
  • OneMedical membership, including tele-health services
  • Personal health advocacy resources through HealthAdvocate
  • Inclusive fertility, hormonal health and family forming benefits through Carrot Fertility
  • Access to the Axios “Family Fund”, which was created to allow employees to request financial support when facing financial hardship or emergencies
  • Increased work flexibility for parents and caretakers
  • Virtual company-sponsored social events
  • A strong and positive work environment
  • A commitment to an open, inclusive, and diverse work culture

Equal Opportunity Employer Statement

Axios is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, age, gender identity, gender expression, veteran status, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

This policy applies to all employment practices within our organization, including hiring, recruiting, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, leave of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and apprenticeship. Axios makes hiring decisions based solely on qualifications, merit, and business needs at the time.

From $25, paid onceGet the CV for this job

What happens when you press

One press. We do the rest.

  1. A CV for this posting

    Written against Axios's own wording, from every piece of relevant proof in your profile.

  2. 25 readers review it

    Recruiter, hiring manager, skeptic and more read every draft, round after round. You get the best round.

    The review screen in CV Rocket: how each CV was read, round by round.

  3. We apply on Axios's form

    Our application engine gets through the hardest forms there are. Where a question needs you, AI suggests the best answer. Don't want us applying from our IP addresses? Use our Chrome extension: we apply straight from your own browser.

    An application in CV Rocket: every answer filled in on the employer's form.

  4. Every reply, sorted

    Axios's answer lands in your private mailbox, and we classify it on arrival: interview, question, rejection.

    The CV Rocket inbox: each employer reply classified as an interview, an action or a rejection.

  5. Reply with AI

    AI helps you write the email, checks it and sends it. We show you whether the recruiter read it.

  6. The interview in your calendar

    Full integration with your calendar. The invitation goes straight in.

    An interview invitation in the CV Rocket inbox, added to the candidate's calendar.
Get the CV for this job

From $25 per CV, paid once. No subscription.

Why it works

3×

more interviews than doing it yourself with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT writes a CV and never learns what happened to it. We see every reply. For each CV we know:

  • How it was written, and how the review scored it
  • When we applied, and how long after the posting went up
  • Which posting, which company, which city
  • Who got the interview, and who heard nothing

That is how we know which CVs get called.

Get the CV for this job

From $25 per CV, paid once. No subscription.

The numbers game

More applications. More interviews.

Every application goes out with its own CV, written for that posting and paid once. Send enough of them and the law of large numbers finds you the job.

Get the CV for this job
By hand5–10
With CV Rocket100
applications a day

Nearby

Live postings like this one

Same employer first, then the same role elsewhere.

Before you press

Straight answers

Get the CV for this job

From $25 per CV, paid once. No subscription.

What if my background isn't good enough?

We make the most of the background you have. The CV uses every piece of relevant proof your profile holds, and one of the 25 readers reads your whole profile and flags what the CV left out.

Do you really apply for me?

Yes, on the employer's own form, the hardest ones included. Where a question needs you, you answer it right there and AI suggests the best answer. Don't want us applying from our IP addresses? Use our Chrome extension: we apply straight from your own browser.

Is it a subscription?

No. You pay once per CV, from $25. Every application goes out with its own CV, written for that posting.

One job. One CV.
Paid once.

Pick the posting you want. We write for it, apply for you and catch the reply.

Get the CV for this job

From $25 per CV, paid once. No subscription.