We believe every company should be a developer experience company. That’s why we’re working on a suite of tools, infrastructure, and services that empower developers to craft delightful experiences for their end users.
We love CLI tools. Providing user-friendly, robust, and reliable CLIs are central to offering a good developer experience, but often they are an afterthought that never gets prioritized.
Designing, building, releasing, and maintaining CLI tools should be as structured and hassle-free as pushing a web application to Heroku or Vercel, and we’ve raised money to build that future.
We’re assembling a team of product-driven generalist engineers to build the initial product offering in collaboration with our design partners. If you love developer tools and are eager to improve everyone’s developer experience, we hope you consider applying!
📦 Cross-platform distribution
Traditionally, developer tools are distributed through OS or programming language-specific package managers. However, as tooling ecosystems grows in size and scope, the desire to support multiple technologies and platforms leads to a need for packaging a single tool multiple times. This work is critical to your end user’s experience, but is really unpleasant and tedious. What if you could outsource it to a dedicated service?
🤐 Privacy-first product metrics
Your work as a developer doesn’t end when the CLI is compiled and distributed, that’s just the beginning of the experience for your users. Unfortunately, teams often have very little insight into how their tool is used unless something goes wrong. What if authors could enable opt-in, privacy-preserving, and anonymous usage metrics with a line of code?
💡 Cross- and intra-tool discovery
When tools are language or platform-specific, discovery and reuse becomes much harder. Often tools are discovered through serendipity or word of mouth. Commands and features within tools are often discovered in the same way – the alphabetically ordered man-pages certainly don’t help. What if tools could surface relevant commands or even complementary tools automatically?
🎨 Developer-focused product development
Developer experience is both a very old, and, paradoxically, new, space that is largely measured by what the kids these days call “vibes”. Especially in open source, this leads to “katamari”-style product development, where features are green-lit without consideration for coherence on a larger and longer term scale. As a result, tools that started out simple, grow complex and drive users into a hype cycle of finding the next new thing, not in search of novelty, but usability. What we if we inverted how we thought about tools- instead of focusing on features, focusing on problems to solve- and had that reinforced by our development systems?
🌍 Remote-first team
Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity often isn’t. Axo is remote and distributed from day one. We will hire team members from anywhere, as either full-time employees or contractors, at their choice (within the constraint of US law) - assuming that folks are OK with following US work hours (generally within 08:00-21:00 EST).
⚖️ Equal and transparent pay
All full-time salaried members of the team, regardless of location (including the CEO) are paid the same wage: $125,000 USD.
🧩 Everyone has a stake
A sense of ownership is important. That is why all members of the starting team will receive 1% equity option, with an industry-standard 1-year cliff and a 4-year vesting period.
🗓 4-day work week
In knowledge-based work, it’s both a blessing and a curse that it is hard to turn your brain off. We work 4 days a week because we recognize the importance of rest to sustainable high-performance creative work.
🐙 Interdisciplinary and curious
We’re looking for folks who see connections across individual tasks, thrive when collaborating across a variety of domains, and are excited to explore areas outside their previous experience.
🙋♀️ Autonomous, together
We are a small, ambitious team that moves with urgency and deliberateness. Every team member is granted the privilege and responsibility of owning several critical tasks from beginning to end. Despite working with great independence, we eagerly solicit feedback early and often from each other. We may need to move fast, but never at the expense of going far.