Applied AI Engineer

About Axle Axle is rebuilding the back office of commercial vehicle operations with AI-native tools for the people who keep the world moving: drivers, technicians, service leaders, operators, and fleet managers. As trucks become electric, autonomous, and software-defined, the complexity behind the scenes, especially in repair and maintenance, is exploding. We’ve lived the problems we’re solving, we’re growing very quickly with real customers and revenue, and we’re backed by top investors like Base10. More About This Role This is an applied AI role: you’ll own the model lifecycle from research to production, work closely with product and engineering to get features into the hands of customers fast, and iterate based on immediate feedback from the field. The work you do will directly shape how the $160B fleet repair industry is managed in the next decade. What You’ll Do • Design, train, and deploy AI-powered features like speech-to-text transcription, entity extraction, classification and help shape our evaluation and experimentation platform • Work with messy, domain-specific data, shop-floor audio, unstructured repair notes, scanned documents • Integrate models directly into Axle’s mobile and web products, working closely with full-stack engineers to get features into users’ hands fast • Rapidly experiment with model architectures, fine-tuning strategies, and data-cleaning approaches to improve accuracy and usability • Monitor real-world performance in production, tuning for accuracy, latency, and cost efficiency • Explore and prototype new AI capabilities from 0–1 across a clear customer-approved roadmap What Makes You a Great Fit • 2-5 years of applied AI/ML engineering experience in an enterprise, startup, or product-focused setting • Strong Python skills, with experience in ML/NLP frameworks • Hands-on experience with speech-to-text systems, or classification models • Comfortable working with unstructured, noisy datasets in real-world environments • Excited to work at an early-stage startup where you’ll own projects end-to-end and ship quickly • Collaborative, curious, low ego Bonus Points • Interest in applying AI to physical or “built world” environments • Exposure to mobile-first or offline-first applications • Founder or founding team experience - you’ve been in and like working in small teams What We Offer • A product with real pull from customers, and a high-agency, close-knit team • Competitive compensation + early-stage equity • Benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance + 401k • A generous home-office and equipment budget • LA office in the Arts District and frequent team meetups