Meet the Axiom Trade Team

A small team, by design

Axiom is run by a small team with a strong bias toward depth over headcount. Every engineer on the platform writes code that runs in production within their first week; every designer ships pixels to real users; every operations hire owns a meaningful surface from day one. We hire slowly and we keep the team's footprint small on purpose — the alternative is communication overhead that slows the platform down.

The engineering org

Engineering is split into three pods. The execution pod owns the signing layer, the routing logic, the RPC fleet, MEV protection, and the perpetuals venue integration. The data pod owns the event store, the Pulse ingestion pipeline, the analytics that power Trader Scan and Trackers, and the public API. The product pod owns the web client, the design system, and the surfaces users actually touch. Each pod has a lead who is accountable for both delivery and the long-term health of the systems they own.

Design and product

Design is fully embedded in product engineering rather than operating as a separate function. Designers pair with engineers from the first sketch through the production deploy; reviews happen on real builds, not in static files. The result is a smaller volume of design work than at most companies, but a much higher proportion of it shipping unchanged.

Operations, support, and community

Support is staffed by people who actively trade. Every support agent has a session wallet, places trades, and reads the same charts users do. This is not a perk; it is the only way support can resolve trade-related issues in minutes rather than hours. Community lives alongside support and is run by the same team — there is no separate "growth" function that operates independently of the people who answer tickets.

Security and infrastructure

A dedicated security function reports outside the engineering org and has independent authority to block or rewind any change that affects the platform's custody guarantees. Infrastructure is operated by a small team that on-calls alongside execution engineers, with explicit ownership of the SLOs that define what "fast" and "available" mean in practice.

How we work together

Async by default. Documents over meetings. One short daily sync per pod, one weekly cross-pod review, and as few additional meetings as possible. Decisions are written down in a shared document store that anyone in the company can read; reversals of past decisions are required to cite the original document and explain what changed.

Compensation and equity

Every team member receives meaningful equity and we share the underlying numbers — total shares outstanding, recent valuations, exercise terms — so that equity is something the team can evaluate honestly rather than a vague upside. Cash compensation is benchmarked against high-end roles at well-funded startups in our geography and reviewed annually.

Where the team is

The team is mostly distributed across North America and Europe, with a smaller cluster in Asia for follow-the-sun coverage on execution-critical systems. We meet in person twice a year — once for an engineering-focused offsite and once for a company-wide gathering. Travel is expected for both and supported for any team member who can attend.

Wanting to join

Open roles are listed on the jobs page; cold applications for roles we have not posted are welcome. We hire deliberately and we communicate quickly, including on rejections, because the alternative wastes everyone's time.

How the wider circle works

A small core team operates the platform day-to-day. Around that core is a wider circle of advisors, contractors, and trusted alumni who participate in specific work without being on payroll. This is not a fiction to inflate the team page; it is a description of how a serious technical platform actually gets built in 2026.

Security advisors

Two independent security researchers conduct ongoing reviews of the platform's architecture, with full access to the codebase and the operational environment. Their findings are tracked alongside internal findings in the same issue queue and addressed with the same urgency. We disclose the names of our security advisors privately to enterprise partners who require it; we keep them off the public page at the advisors' preference.

Trading advisors

A small group of active traders — including some who use Axiom heavily and several who do not — review product changes before they ship and contribute feedback on workflow gaps the team would not see from inside the building. The composition rotates; the goal is fresh perspective rather than institutional inertia.

Engineering contractors

For specialized work that does not justify a full-time hire — for example, a one-time data-pipeline migration or a focused security review of a specific subsystem — we engage contractors with deep expertise in the specific area. Contractors are bound by the same security and disclosure obligations as full-time staff, and they typically work alongside an engineer who will continue to own the surface after the engagement ends.

Alumni

People who have left Axiom remain in the circle when both they and the team want it. Several alumni continue to advise on the surfaces they built, review architectural changes that affect their former work, and participate in interview processes for the roles they used to hold. The pattern is informal and unpaid in most cases; it works because the relationships were built on mutual respect during the original tenure.

Investors

Our investors hold equity and contribute capital. They do not direct product strategy, hiring, or trading decisions. Several have backgrounds in trading or in adjacent technical infrastructure and are useful sounding boards on strategic questions; the relationship is collaborative rather than directive.

Why we publish all of this

The crypto industry has been repeatedly burned by anonymous teams making expansive claims. We are not anonymous; we publish the names and roles of the people doing the work because that accountability is part of the product. If something goes wrong, you should know who to call; if something goes right, the credit belongs to the people who did the work.