Location: Seattle, WA

Your Impact

We are Axon Foundation Services (AFS), a group of dedicated and focused engineers that own, build and operate the most critical services and primitives that Axon products need like storage, compute, cartography, permissions, authentication, evidence audit and reliability engineering. Our customers are Axon products like Evidence.com, Axon Records, Axon Real Time Operations and Axon Devices (TASER and Connected Cameras) that use our critical services to execute the mission of protecting life, reducing social conflict, and building a fair and effective justice system. Everything we do solves problems for Axon as a whole, so our product teams can focus their investments on non-duplicative, application-specific work that serves their missions.
The systems that AFS owns are the heart and lungs for all Axon products. We protect customer trust by securely authenticating users, third party apps and enforce permissions within all Axon products. We ingest and manage over 100PB of video evidence and securely store them for evidentiary purposes from Axon body cameras and other third party sources. AFS sets the standard and leads the way for the entire company on operational excellence, incident response and reliability engineering. We ensure every important event of note within Axon products leaves an imprint through our audit services that protects the sanctity of evidence as it moves through the criminal justice system. Axon’s records, and real time operations products need on our mapping services for staff productivity, effective emergency response to a crisis and situational awareness tools.
As the Director of Software Engineering for Axon Foundation Services, you are responsible for managing engineering staff across two continents, helping drive the technical direction and execution of the team’s mission across several key initiatives. You will be responsible for defining and measuring core team metrics, ensuring quality by overseeing code and design reviews with your team, collaborating with other engineers across the company to learn of their pain points and be empathetic to the needs of the developer community at Axon.

Your Day-to-Day: 

• Hire, develop the best and manage a mission critical team across two continents
• Influence, build partnerships with the leaders across the company to ensure AFS is driving the Axon mission forward
• Co-own, influence and execute on the roadmap for AFS that creates the most leverage for the company
• Set the highest standard for reliability, security, and operational excellence through example for the entire company
• Drive improvements in systems, processes, and practices across every service we own
• Build and enhance tools to improve engineering productivity and simplify development for every service we own
• Work with senior staff and distinguished engineers across the company to look around corners, spot bottle necks and establish the right technical architecture
• Stay current on advancements in infrastructure landscape, cloud providers and influence adoption across enterprise
• Support existing existing team in career growth of their SWE skills and build a culture of excellence
• Lead and participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation to own system outages response, their retrospectives and set the culture as a learning organization
• Be able to accurately and confidently communicate status of team and initiatives to Sr. leadership
• Be familiar with budgetary items (Capex, Opex) to ensure proper forecasting and planning
• Consistently meet or exceed SLA obligations, company missions and metrics

Basic Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field preferred
• 10+ years’ experience in Software Engineering, with 5+ years leading SWE teams
• Experience working within an Agile Software Development Lifecycle
• Experience with cloud IaaS and PaaS offerings such as AWS or Azure
• Ability and eagerness to quickly learn new technologies and approaches
• Strong people and organizational leader, strong communication skills, both verbal and written
• Working proficiency with one or more high-level programming languages used in systems engineering such as C, C++, Python, Golang or Java.
• Knowledgeable of CI/CD automation development (Jenkins pipelines ideally)
• Experience with strong knowledge of automating Cloud base deployment like Terraform for configuring, building and deploying changes and Kubernetes

Preferred Qualifications:

• You distilled your people and team management practices into a set of models and principles that you regularly verbalize, apply, and improve
• You thrived in multi-functional organizations by building consensus and partnering with product management, UX design, security, and recruiting
• You have calibrated coding, system design and behavioral job interview questions that you used to hire top talent and quickly grow your team
• You maintained high performance standards by collecting objective metrics and peer feedback for performance evaluation and management
• You mentored junior and senior engineers, helping them understand themselves, influence others, and advance towards their career goals
• You established trust with senior leaders by aligning your priorities with theirs, providing timely, accurate, and succinct status updates, and helping other teams when needed
• You have kept your engineering skills sharp so you can review your team's code, evaluate design options, and provide high-level cost estimates
• You follow the latest in open source technologies and can intuit the fine line between a promising new practice and an overhyped fad

Compensation and Benefits:

• Competitive salary and 401K with employer match
• Discretionary paid time off
• Robust parental leave policy
• An award-winning office/working environment
• Ride along with police officers to see them use our technology and get inspired
• And more...