Software Engineer (Product)

Position: Software Engineer (Product)

Role Location: Bellevue WA - Local to or able to relocate to be in person 5 days a week in Bellevue WA - not hybrid not remote

Duration: Fulltime

Scope of Role

Axel is hiring its second product engineer. Someone who owns a class of problems that sit between vibe-coding and infrastructure-staff-engineer work - Stephen can hand him a problem that requires real correctness and pace and this person will hunt it down until its done at high quality leveraging AI tools without being plinked through them.

Stephen vibe-codes a UI to 85% then hands it off - UI design polish goes to the design lead and the front-end execution to the teams front-end engineer. This role fills out that layer: closing the last 20% on product engineering work the kind of problem thats above what Claude can do alone but below the staff-engineer work of getting Terraform exactly right or making sure the payments ledger ties out. With Axel doubling booking volume month over month Stephen needs more people who can take this kind of problem off his plate without becoming a pain. The hire reports to Stephen directly; the engineering org is flat no managers in between.

What Youll Own

Take product engineering problems - the class of work that requires correctness and pace

Build out more agentic behaviors for Axel and expand Axels tool set as the agentic booking product matures

Ship reliably with high agency no I need four weeks to do this energy

MUST HAVE SKILLS

Requirements

1-4 years of experience

Strong front-end chops with product-engineering depth

Fluent with AI coding tools (Claude Cursor Codex) as a force multiplier not a crutch

Comfortable working on agentic systems - building new agent behaviors expanding the agentic tool set integrating LLMs into product flows

Reads every line of code not vibe-coding through problems without comprehension

Execution and Energy

Natural startup energy - the candidate must clearly want startup not be okay with startup.

Has done high-agency projects naturally in their own life - started businesses shipped personal projects pushed through hard problems out of energy not assignment

Brings natural excitement and emotional ownership to difficult achievements

High pace - moves through problems quickly

Low ego collaborative

Background

Has shipped real product engineering work ideally at a startup. Someone who built things at startups before knows how to leverage AI in the workflow and isnt FAANG-pedigreed-without-startup-output.