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About This Role
#### 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.
AI Infrastructure Engineer, Corporate AI Team
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Team \& Role Overview
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Axon's Corporate AI Team sits within Business Technology and builds internal\-facing AI solutions that help employees reduce manual work, move faster, and focus on higher\-value work. The team develops AI\-powered tools, internal applications, integrations, and automation workflows used across Axon.
We're looking for an AI Infrastructure Engineer to help move internal AI and software prototypes from "it works" to "it is production\-ready, secure, reliable, supportable, and maintainable." This role focuses on the operational backbone of internal applications: infrastructure, CI/CD, deployment patterns, reliability, maintenance, support, and production readiness.
This is a hands\-on individual contributor role that blends platform engineering, DevOps, internal tools engineering, and applied AI infrastructure. You'll work closely with Corporate AI, IT, Enterprise Data, Security, and business teams to support applications that replace existing software, augment workflows, and improve how teams operate.
We're open to candidates at multiple levels. This could be a strong platform or DevOps engineer ready to grow into broader ownership, or an experienced infrastructure engineer who has operated internal systems at scale.
In this role, you'll:
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- Own maintenance, support, and operational readiness for internal AI\-enabled applications and tools.
- Help productionize prototypes built by Corporate AI, business teams, or technical partners.
- Improve infrastructure and deployment patterns, with a focus on Vercel\-hosted applications and tools deployed across Azure, AWS, and other environments.
- Build and maintain CI/CD, infrastructure\-as\-code patterns, monitoring, secrets management, access controls, runbooks, and support processes.
- Partner through testing, rollout, UAT, and long\-term maintenance so internal tools remain useful, stable, secure, and dependable.
This is not an AI research role. You do not need to train models or develop novel ML techniques. You should understand how modern AI\-powered applications are built, deployed, secured, monitored, and supported in an enterprise environment.
What You'll Do
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Productionize Internal Tools \& Prototypes
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- Turn prototypes, proof\-of\-concepts, and team\-built tools into reliable applications for real business users.
- Improve production readiness across inherited applications, including deployment configuration, monitoring, error handling, documentation, testing, access controls, and supportability.
- Partner with Corporate AI engineers and business teams to move applications from prototype to pilot to production.
- Support UAT and rollout by helping validate that applications meet business needs, are stable for daily use, and have a clear support model.
- Identify reliability, security, scalability, and maintainability gaps before tools become business\-critical.
- Ensure internal applications are not just built, but owned, supported, and continuously improved.
Own Infrastructure, CI/CD \& Platform Operations
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- Own and improve the operational model for internal applications hosted on Vercel, including deployment patterns, configuration, environment management, access controls, monitoring, and production support.
- Support internal applications running across Azure, AWS, GCP, and other cloud environments, with Azure experience especially helpful.
- Build and maintain CI/CD workflows, primarily using GitHub Actions.
- Apply infrastructure\-as\-code concepts using Terraform, Bicep, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or similar tools.
- Manage platform concerns such as secrets, environment variables, deployment automation, access control, logging, alerting, and operational documentation.
- Partner with IT, Security, Enterprise Data, and Corporate AI to align infrastructure patterns with Axon's security and compliance expectations.
- Participate in shared production support and incident response for internal tools and applications.
Maintain and Improve Existing Systems
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- Own ongoing maintenance and support for internal applications, integrations, web apps, backend services, extensions, and workflow tools.
- Fix bugs, improve reliability, manage dependency updates, address security patches, and reduce operational toil.
- Improve observability so the team can understand application health, usage, errors, cost, and reliability.
- Create runbooks, support documentation, checklists, and escalation paths for applications under Corporate AI ownership.
- Reduce the burden on engineers focused on net\-new work by taking ownership of systems that need upkeep and operational care.
- Take pride in brownfield engineering: improving existing systems and making them safer, cleaner, more reliable, and easier to operate.
Establish Internal Tool Lifecycle Standards
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- Help build a repeatable lifecycle model for internal tools, from prototype intake through production readiness, support, maintenance, and retirement.
- Create practical standards such as production readiness checklists, UAT checklists, CI/CD templates, infrastructure patterns, runbook templates, and support handoff processes.
- Help define what it means for an internal application to be experimental, in pilot, production\-ready, business\-critical, or ready for deprecation.
- Improve how the team inherits, supports, and maintains applications created by other teams or through rapid prototyping.
- Identify opportunities to consolidate, simplify, and standardize internal applications and infrastructure over time.
Support Applied AI Systems
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- Support infrastructure and operations for AI\-powered internal tools, including applications that use LLMs, AI agents, RAG workflows, automation frameworks, and enterprise integrations.
- Understand core AI application concepts such as prompt engineering, retrieval\-augmented generation, agentic workflows, model APIs, evaluations, and AI safety considerations.
- Help ensure AI\-enabled tools are deployed with appropriate safeguards around data access, secrets, logging, auditability, and responsible use.
- Partner with Corporate AI to ensure AI\-powered applications are reliable, secure, supportable, and aligned with Axon's internal standards.
Collaborate Across Axon
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- Work closely with Corporate AI, Enterprise Data, IT, Security, and business stakeholders across Axon.
- Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, support concerns, and infrastructure needs clearly to technical and non\-technical partners.
- Collaborate with teams replacing existing software, augmenting workflows, or building internal tools to solve business problems.
- Support internal users and stakeholders during rollout, support, and improvement cycles when needed.
- Bring ownership to ambiguous problems, especially when applications have unclear support models, incomplete documentation, or evolving requirements.
What You Bring
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- 4\+ years of experience in platform engineering, DevOps, infrastructure engineering, internal tools engineering, automation engineering, software engineering, or a related technical role.
- Strong cloud infrastructure experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP; Azure experience is especially helpful.
- Experience with infrastructure\-as\-code concepts and tools such as Terraform, Bicep, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or similar.
- Experience building, maintaining, or supporting CI/CD pipelines, especially with GitHub Actions.
- Strong understanding of deployment patterns, environments, secrets management, access controls, monitoring, logging, and production support.
- Ability to read, understand, maintain, and improve application code in Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, or similar languages.
- Experience supporting production or production\-like systems, including bug fixes, incident response, dependency updates, documentation, and reliability improvements.
- Familiarity with AI application concepts such as LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG, agents, model evaluation, AI security risks, and responsible AI practices.
- Strong ownership mindset, including comfort taking over work others started, bringing order to ambiguity, and making systems more reliable over time.
- Strong communication skills and ability to work with technical teams, IT partners, security stakeholders, and internal business users.
- Comfort with brownfield engineering, maintenance, support, and operational excellence.
- Practical, service\-oriented mindset focused on whether internal tools work well for the people depending on them.
Preferred Experience
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You do not need all of these, but experience in several areas will help you ramp quickly:
- Operating applications on Vercel, including configuration, deployments, environment variables, access controls, monitoring, and production support.
- Supporting internal tools, enterprise applications, workflow automation, or business\-critical internal systems.
- Azure infrastructure, identity, networking, application hosting, and security patterns.
- Authentication and authorization patterns such as SSO, OAuth/OIDC, Entra ID / Azure AD, RBAC, service principals, and secrets management.
- Observability tools, logging platforms, alerting systems, uptime monitoring, incident response, and operational runbooks.
- Maintaining applications built with Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React, or similar modern stacks.
- Backend services, APIs, integrations, serverless applications, containers, or cloud\-hosted web applications.
- AI\-powered internal tools, LLM applications, RAG workflows, agents, Slackbots, enterprise integrations, or automation platforms.
- Integrating with enterprise systems such as Slack, Jira, Confluence/Quip, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Snowflake, ServiceNow, or similar.
- Working in regulated, security\-sensitive, or compliance\-heavy environments.
- Creating engineering standards, templates, checklists, lifecycle models, or production readiness frameworks.
- Participating in UAT, release readiness, stakeholder testing, or internal application rollout processes.
- Mentoring or enabling other engineers through documentation, templates, examples, or operational best practices.
Ideal Candidate Profile
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The ideal candidate is a platform\-minded engineer who enjoys taking useful but unfinished software and making it dependable. You may have a background as a DevOps engineer, platform engineer, infrastructure engineer, internal tools engineer, automation engineer, or software engineer with strong operational instincts.
You are not looking only for greenfield feature work. You are energized by making systems stable, maintainable, observable, secure, and easy to support. You are comfortable inheriting prototypes, understanding how they work, identifying what is missing, and building the infrastructure and operational practices needed to make them successful.
You are someone who can say, "I'll own this," and then bring structure to the application, deployment, support model, documentation, and long\-term maintenance plan.
Success in This Role
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In your first 30 days, you will build context on Axon's Corporate AI application landscape, understand the current Vercel and cloud footprint, meet key partners across Corporate AI, IT, Enterprise Data, and Security, and identify the highest\-priority reliability and maintenance gaps.
In your first 90 days, you will begin owning maintenance for a set of internal applications, improve deployment and monitoring patterns for priority tools, support at least one application through testing or rollout, and establish early production readiness expectations for tools moving beyond prototype stage.
In your first 6 months, you will help establish a repeatable internal tool lifecycle program, improve the operational model for Vercel\-hosted applications, harden multiple prototypes or inherited tools into supportable applications, and reduce the maintenance burden on engineers focused on net\-new development.
Role Summary
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This role is for someone who wants to help Axon turn internal AI ideas into dependable software. You will not only help applications get built — you will help make sure they keep working, remain secure, support real users, and can be maintained over time.
The best person for this role is a scrappy, ownership\-oriented platform engineer who cares deeply about reliability, infrastructure, and operational excellence, and who is excited to support the next generation of AI\-powered internal tools at Axon.
Don't meet every single requirement? That's ok. At Axon, we Aim Far. We think big with a long\-term view because we want to reinvent the world to be a safer, better place. We are also committed to building diverse teams that reflect the communities we serve.
Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they check every box in the job description. If you're excited about this role and our mission to Protect Life but your experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification listed here, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Important Notes
*The above job description is not intended as, nor should it be construed as, exhaustive of all duties, responsibilities, skills, efforts, or working conditions associated with this job. The job description may change or be supplemented at any time in accordance with business needs and conditions.*
*Some roles may also require legal eligibility to work in a firearms environment.*
*We collect personal information from applicants to evaluate candidates for employment. You may request access, deletion, or exercise other CCPA rights at* *[email protected]* *or via our* *Axon Privacy Web Form**. For more information, please see the Your California Privacy Rights section of our* *Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice.*
*Axon's mission is to Protect Life and is committed to the well\-being and safety of its employees as well as Axon's impact on the environment. All Axon employees must be aware of and committed to the appropriate environmental, health, and safety regulations, policies, and procedures. Axon employees are empowered to report safety concerns as they arise and activities potentially impacting the environment.*
*We are an equal opportunity employer that promotes justice, advances equity, values diversity and fosters inclusion. We're committed to hiring the best talent — regardless of race, creed, color, ancestry, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, genetic information, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances — and empowering all of our employees so they can do their best work. If you have a disability or special need that requires assistance or accommodation during the application or the recruiting process, please email* *[email protected].* *Please note that this email address is for accommodation purposes only. Axon will not respond to inquiries for other purposes.*
Phishing alert: Axon will never ask you to pay for any part of the hiring process, including training, equipment, or background checks. We do not make job offers via text message, WhatsApp, or instant messaging platforms without a formal interview process. All legitimate job openings are listed on our official careers page at https://www.axon.com/careers. If you receive a suspicious offer or outreach from an email address that is not @axon.com, or if you are asked for sensitive personal information (bank details, Social Security Number) prematurely, please ignore the message and report it to [email protected].
Salary Context
This $154K-$247K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $175K across 2162 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 4,317 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 70% of the market. At Axon, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $214,900 based on 6,420 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $194,400. This role's midpoint ($200K) sits 7% below the category median. Disclosed range: $154K to $247K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($287,500) and Research Engineer ($272,100). By seniority level: Entry: $110,000; Mid: $194,400; Senior: $227,400; Director: $274,554; VP: $241,000.
Axon AI Hiring
Axon has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Seattle, WA, US. Compensation range: $247K - $247K.
Location Context
AI roles in Seattle pay a median of $228,700 across 516 tracked positions. That's 6% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 4,317 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 138 entry-level, 2,071 mid-level, 1,655 senior, and 453 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (635 positions). The remaining 3,657 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $215,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $266,300. The 90th percentile reaches $320,790. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($287,500 median, 34 roles); Research Engineer ($272,100 median, 227 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($244,000 median, 23 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 4,317 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (3,004), Data Scientist (345), AI Software Engineer (309). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (138) are outnumbered by mid-level (2,071) and senior (1,655) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 453 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (635 positions), with 3,657 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $215,000. Top-quartile roles start at $266,300, and the 90th percentile reaches $320,790. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $287,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,000. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (2,249 postings), Aws (1,224 postings), Azure (938 postings), Rag (915 postings), Gcp (660 postings), Pytorch (640 postings), Prompt Engineering (624 postings), Kubernetes (559 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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