Engineering Manager

1 big thing: Axios is a growth-focused media company dedicated to helping people get smarter, faster on what matters. As we continue to scale our technology and platforms, this role ensures our engineering teams can effectively adopt, build, and operate modern tools that support that growth.

Why it matters: At Axios, we deliver news that's clinical, trustworthy, and informative, reaching millions of readers every day. As an Engineering Manager, you'll shape both the technical direction and execution of our platforms. This is a player‑coach role – you stay close to the work, contribute where it counts, and make the team faster by removing friction, not adding it.

• Technical leadership & contribution: Stay close to the code and architecture. Contribute directly when it unblocks the team, resolves complexity, or accelerates a critical path – not to gatekeep.
• Execution & delivery: Drive high-quality, timely delivery by making decisions quickly, clearing obstacles, and ensuring the team has what they need to ship without waiting on you.
• Mentorship & team development: Coach engineers through direct 1:1 feedback, career guidance, and hands‑on pairing. Raise the bar on ownership so the team increasingly solves problems without escalation.
• Cross‑functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Design, and stakeholders to bring clarity to priorities and translate them into effective execution. Be the person who makes alignment easy, not another layer of indirection.
• Code quality & reliability: Establish and uphold best practices for code quality, testing, and system reliability to ensure maintainable and scalable systems.
• Agentic workflows & AI fluency: Leverage and evolve agentic workflows and AI‑assisted development practices to improve team productivity, accelerate delivery, and enhance engineering quality.
• Focus & prioritization: Protect the team's time. Say no to low‑value work, reduce ambiguity, and keep everyone pointed at what actually moves the business forward.
• Operational excellence: Identify and remove blockers, improve team processes, and continuously increase velocity, ownership, and effectiveness.

• 3–7 years of experience leading engineering teams, with a strong background in backend or full‑stack web development.
• A strong engineering foundation. You can contribute meaningfully to production code, not just review or direct it. Your technical credibility earns trust.
• Player‑coach instincts. Leadership through context, not contribution. You lead by staying close to the work, and understand the technical landscape, anticipating friction, and equip the team to move fast.
• An unblocker mindset with product instinct. You default to enabling autonomy, make decisions visible, and share context proactively. You think like a product partner, identifying the highest‑impact work and connecting engineering effort to business outcomes.
• AI fluency. You actively use AI‑assisted development tools and agentic workflows, and you push the team to do the same.
• System design judgment. You make pragmatic architectural calls that balance speed, scalability, and long‑term maintainability.
• Coaching that raises the bar. You help engineers grow through honest feedback, high standards, and increasing responsibility.
• Clear, decisive communication. You simplify complex problems, make tradeoffs explicit, and keep teams and stakeholders aligned without over complicating things.

• Experience coaching engineers through the transition from IC to tech lead, or from mid‑level to senior.
• Experience leading in a pod or squad model where your team owns a surface area end‑to‑end and you’re accountable for outcomes, not just execution.
• Familiarity with content platforms, API‑driven architectures, or consumer‑facing systems that operate at scale.
• Proven track record of taking ideas to delivery using the PDLC and user testing.

• The team moves faster because of you, not despite you. You're embedded in the work providing context, direction, and hands‑on support, and the team rarely waits on decisions, approvals, or information.
• Engineers grow in ownership and impact. Over time,…