Engineering Manager

About this role

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.

Responsibilities:

As an Engineering Manager at Axios, you'll lead a team of engineers while staying close to the technical work. You'll be responsible for:

• 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.

Skills:

Ideal candidates are hands-on engineering leaders who care deeply about building high-quality products, developing strong teams, and driving meaningful outcomes, and bring the following skills:

• 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.