Software Engineer (Product)

Axel is the consumer AI travel agent from Gordian Software (YC W19), the team that already powers flight ancillaries (seat selection, baggage, premium add-ons) for Priceline, Hopper, Trip.com, and 100+ airlines including Lufthansa, United, and Singapore Airlines, serving 60M+ passengers a month on the B2B side. Gordian raised a $25M Series A at a $200M valuation, backed by Y Combinator, Accomplice, Vinyl, Kinnevik, DST Global Partners, Latitude, LocalGlobe, and Naval Ravikant.

Founded by Stephen Grabowski (CEO, ex-Skyscanner supplier analytics lead, ex-ITA Software / Google Flights) and Joe Sarre. The team is in person 5 days a week in Bellevue, WA. Axel is the consumer wedge: an AI travel agent that runs over WhatsApp and pays users back when their flights or hotels drop in price. Tracks bookings 24/7, automatically reprices, and either refunds the difference or rebooks at the better rate. Booking volume is going berserk, April closed at $98K, May is tracking $170-200K, and the curve is bending up.

All on flat marketing spend; growth is coming entirely from product quality improvements and edge-case coverage. Stephen wants to push that curve harder, which means hiring the product engineer who can close the last 20% on AI-generated work and ship a class of problems Claude can't reliably solve on its own.

Axel is hiring its second product engineer. Someone who owns a class of problems that sit between vibe-coding and infrastructure-staff-engineer work, Stephen can hand him a problem that requires real correctness and pace, and this person will hunt it down until it's done at high quality, use AI tools without being plinked through them. Stephen vibe-codes a UI to ~85%, then hands it off, UI design polish goes to the design lead, and the front-end execution to the team's front-end engineer.

This role fills out that layer: closing the last 20% on product engineering work, the kind of problem that's above what Claude can do alone but below the staff-engineer work of getting Terraform exactly right or making sure the payments ledger ties out. With Axel doubling booking volume month over month, Stephen needs more people who can take this kind of problem off his plate without becoming a pain. The hire reports to Stephen directly; the engineering org is flat, no managers in between.