Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Axon•Washington, DC

20h•Hybrid

About The Position

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other. Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter. Your Impact You are a Staff Site Reliability Engineer who will help define how Axon builds and operates its core platforms, with a primary focus on Zero Touch, our controlled, compliant execution framework, and the identity and security foundations that sit around it. Rather than manually provisioning infrastructure or running tickets, you design and build the platforms, tooling, and guardrails that enable hundreds of engineers to operate safely and efficiently at scale. You bring a strong background in infrastructure and platform engineering, deep experience with distributed systems, and a bias toward automation, self-service, and policy-by-default. You think in terms of APIs, workflows, and golden paths, not servers and scripts. You care as much about security, identity, and auditability as you do about latency and error budgets, and you are comfortable working in highly regulated environments where correctness, traceability, and least privilege are non‑negotiable. This role is highly cross‑functional. You will collaborate with staff and senior engineers across product and platform teams to shape how we build, deploy, secure, and operate Axon’s cloud systems in a modern, AI‑driven environment. Location - This role is based out of our Seattle office and follows a hybrid schedule. We rely on in-person collaboration and ask that team members work onsite Tuesdays through Fridays, with the flexibility to work remotely on Mondays, unless there is an approved workplace accommodation. We believe that connection fuels innovation, and our in-office culture is designed to foster meaningful teamwork, mentorship, and shared success.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on infrastructure, platform, or reliability engineering.
Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Go, TypeScript, Python, or Java, with an emphasis on building services and tooling, not just scripts.
Experience operating and scaling public‑facing, distributed systems, including designing for availability, latency, and graceful degradation.
Deep familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CDK, CloudFormation) and modern CI/CD practices, including how to model policies, environments, and workflows as code.
Demonstrated experience building or owning platforms that other engineers depend on (e.g., deployment frameworks, execution engines, internal developer platforms, or SRE tooling).
Practical experience with identity and access management:
Integrating applications and platforms with SSO/OIDC providers and enforcing RBAC/ABAC.
Designing safe patterns for secrets management, key management, and workload identity.
Working with security and compliance partners to translate requirements into concrete, testable controls.
Experience improving security posture in cloud environments, including secure defaults, least‑privilege access patterns, and auditable change workflows.
Proven ability to lead through influence in highly collaborative, cross‑functional environments; you are comfortable driving consensus across product, platform, security, and compliance teams.
Strong system design and architecture skills, with a track record of making sound trade‑offs under ambiguity and scaling systems and platforms over multiple years.
Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and developing technical talent, helping others grow into stronger platform, SRE, or security engineers.
Excellent communication skills; you can explain complex systems, constraints, and trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Drive the Zero Touch platform
Lead the design and implementation of Zero Touch, Axon’s controlled, compliant execution framework for operational and change workflows.
Define opinionated workflows, APIs, and abstractions that allow engineers to execute infrastructure and application changes safely, repeatably, and with strong guardrails.
Embed policy‑as‑code, approvals, and audit trails into the framework so that compliance requirements are enforced by default, not as an afterthought.
Drive identity and security posture improvements
Partner with Identity, Security, and Platform teams to design secure patterns for authentication, authorization, and workload identity across cloud platforms.
Define and standardize how services integrate with SSO/OIDC, RBAC, secrets management, certificate management, and key management so that platform workflows and APIs are identity‑aware and least‑privilege by design.
Improve Axon’s overall security posture by building primitives (e.g., policy engines, IAM baselines, secure-by-default templates) that can be reused across teams.
Join Forces on our dual‑cloud infrastructure modernization
Design and build dual‑cloud infrastructure abstractions (e.g., Terraform/CDK modules, platform services, deployment patterns) that allow Axon to run workloads consistently across providers while respecting regional and regulatory constraints.
Align these workflows with our dual‑cloud strategy so that multi‑region and multi‑cloud operations, failover, and rollout patterns are safe and repeatable.
Build platform abstractions that reduce operational burden
Design scalable, multi‑tenant platform services (e.g., deployment pipelines, runtime execution environments, policy engines, observability primitives) that turn recurring operational work into reusable capabilities.
Define clear golden paths and reference implementations for common patterns (e.g., service onboarding, change rollout, incident response automation) that raise the baseline for reliability, security, and developer experience.
Provide architectural and technical leadership
Drive architectural decisions for platform and infrastructure initiatives, balancing long‑term strategy with immediate business needs.
Collaborate with other staff and senior engineers to set technical direction for Axon’s reliability, security, and automation strategy, especially around our execution platform and identity.
Mentor and grow engineers across multiple teams, acting as a force multiplier by raising the technical bar and improving how we design, secure, and operate systems.