Senior Product Engineer (Backend)

About Axle

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

We're looking to hire a Product Engineer. This is a hands-on IC role where you'll spend the vast majority of your time writing code, turning product specs into working systems, and owning features from design through production.

What you'll own

• Ship features end to end. Product requirements and technical design through implementation, testing, rollout, and how it behaves in production a month later.
• Build core product systems. Design and ship the services, APIs, data models, and workflows that banks run their day on.
• Keep it fast as we grow. Find bottlenecks, optimize queries and hot paths, and improve architecture as data volumes and usage climb.

What you bring

• 4+ years building production backend systems, with strong experience in Java/Spring Boot (our primary stack) or a comparable backend framework where you can ramp quickly.
• Strong understanding of backend architecture, API design, asynchronous processing, and production reliability.
• Deep relational database knowledge, particularly PostgreSQL. You should be comfortable with schema design, indexing, query optimization, transactions, migrations, and diagnosing database performance.
• Experience building on AWS — containers, queues, object storage, serverless, monitoring, CI/CD.

Nice to haves

• Experience with infrastructure as code such as Pulumi or Terraform.
• Experience building integrations with enterprise systems, APIs, email infrastructure, or data platforms.
• Experience building AI-powered product features, agentic workflows, or systems that integrate LLMs into production applications.

Why this role at Axle

We're building infrastructure that investment banks treat as mission-critical. You'll own features end to end — backend, database, infrastructure, and the AI systems on top of them — and see your work in the hands of users in days, not quarters. No layers between you and the work.

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.

Benefits & perks

• 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