Pros
Axon's products impact the administration of criminal justice at thousands of agencies worldwide. It's a mission you can be proud of, and the engineering challenges are boundless. The company's financial performance is stellar; if you can manage to get any stock-based or performance-based compensation you'll do well.
Cons
The culture at Axon is quite toxic. It is very competitive, very political, and there is little collaboration between teams. Management doesn't have any interest in building an engineering culture; the focus is entirely on generating revenue in the short-term. Axon treats its engineers as cost centers, and its been offshoring more and more of its engineering over the past few years. Every engineer is expected to fight for their own right to exist; the company doesn't offer any training, some positions don't even offer an advancement rubric. The work in SRE is constant firefighting and manual toil. The company leans heavily on "hero culture" to keep services running. There is no effort put towards addressing technical debt or improving engineering processes. Working 50-60 hour weeks is expected from senior engineers. If you have a family, if you're in your 40s or older, if you want any work-life balance, expect to be managed out of the company in short order.
