Executive Leadership
The people running the company
Axiom Works has been founder-led since 2011. The leadership team is small and has been largely stable since 2015.
Ellen Marsh
CEO & Co-Founder
Ellen built the first version of AxiomFlow's rules engine after a decade running operations at a mid-size manufacturer and deciding the tools available were not good enough. She has no CS background, which is probably why the product ended up designed for people who don't either. Attends all-hands twice a year. Has final say on pricing and customer commitments. Does not use Slack.
David Park
CTO & Co-Founder
Wrote the original rules engine in 2011 and has been quietly refactoring it ever since. David now manages engineering managers rather than engineers, which he describes as an acceptable trade. Reviews architecture decisions. Still has opinions about the data model. Has a standing Thursday meeting with security that hasn't moved since 2017.
Karen Volkov
Chief Operating Officer
Joined in 2014 to turn a functional startup into a company that could scale past 50 people. Responsible for the fact that Axiom Works has documented processes for anything at all. Has opinions about infrastructure costs that occasionally surface in IT's world via Finance. Prefers decisions with clear owners and deadlines.
Rachel Brandt
Chief Financial Officer
Joined in 2016 from a regional accounting firm that handled several of Axiom Works' early customers. Has been working to consolidate the company's cloud spend since 2019. Methodical. Approves all capital expenditure over $5,000. Does not enjoy surprises in the infrastructure budget.
Sales & Customer Success
Getting customers and keeping them
Axiom Works does not use resellers. Every customer relationship runs through this team.
Phil Ruiz
VP of Sales
Has been promising features to prospects since 2016. Maintains a warm relationship with infrastructure because Marcus once fixed the staging environment with twenty minutes to spare before a demo. Travels frequently. Expense reports submitted promptly.
Tanya Okafor
Head of Customer Success
Manages post-sale relationships for all AxiomFlow customers and the twelve AxiomSync accounts that haven't migrated yet. Uses the word "partnership" a lot. Usually the first person to know when something is wrong in production, because a customer has already called her.
Mike Kawamoto
Account Executive
Handles mid-market manufacturing accounts in the northeast. Has closed more deals in Q4 than any other quarter for four years running. Believes strongly in the demo environment.
Lisa Ferreira
Customer Success Manager
Manages onboarding for new AxiomFlow deployments. Responsible for the onboarding documentation that actually gets used, as opposed to the documentation that exists. Has a talent for figuring out what customers mean rather than what they say.
Product
What we build and why
The product team defines the roadmap and answers for it when the roadmap turns out to be wrong.
Sarah Chen
Product Manager, AxiomFlow
Owns the AxiomFlow roadmap. Coordinates between sales, engineering, and customers to decide what gets built and in what order. Has strong feelings about the demo environment because it's the product she can see. Emails Monday mornings.
Ben Portillo
Product Manager, AxiomDash
Leads product development for the analytics add-on. Works closely with the largest accounts to understand what they actually want from dashboards, which is usually different from what they asked for.
Annika Gosse
UX Designer
Responsible for AxiomFlow's interface layer. Has been advocating for a redesign of the workflow builder since 2022. Produces research that is read carefully and then partially implemented. Patient.
Engineering
The people who build it
The engineering team is distributed across product development, integrations, and platform reliability.
Yusuf Halabi
Engineering Manager
Reports to the CTO and manages the core AxiomFlow platform team. Has opinions about test coverage. Occasionally leaves pull request comments that are technically correct and diplomatically suboptimal. Runs the Thursday architecture review.
Mei Lin
Senior Software Engineer
Has maintained AxiomSync's integration layer since 2018. Knows more about it than anyone would prefer, including herself. Currently leading the migration tooling project to help the remaining AxiomSync customers off the platform. Thorough commit messages.
Cora Reyes
Software Engineer
Works on the AxiomDash reporting pipeline. Joined in 2022 as a mid-level hire and has been moving steadily toward senior. Has submitted more internal RFCs than anyone else on the team in the past year.
Nikhil Sharma
Platform Engineer
Owns the build and release pipeline, the internal CI infrastructure, and the parts of the deployment process that nobody else wants to think about. Has strong opinions about reproducible builds. Occasionally sends Slack messages at 6am.
IT & Infrastructure
Keeping everything running
The team that manages internal systems, the hosted demo environments, and the infrastructure that everything else depends on.
Dave Kowalski
Director of IT Operations
Oversees systems, networking, and IT support. Background is originally in network engineering. Has been with Axiom Works since 2015. Describes the infrastructure as mature. Has said "we should really document that" more times than he would admit.
Marcus Webb
Senior Systems Administrator
Six years at Axiom Works. Knows where everything is and why it's there. Communicates efficiently. Available on Slack during business hours and occasionally at 11pm when something is on his mind.
Rachel Huang
Systems Administrator
Handles provisioning, patch cycles, and the ongoing negotiation with finance over cloud consolidation. Came from a managed services background. Has strong opinions about monitoring dashboards, most of which are correct.
Tom Malaney
Network Engineer
Responsible for network infrastructure across the office and the hosted environments. Has been on-call for more holiday weekends than he prefers to discuss. Thorough in documentation when he finds time to write it.
Security & Compliance
Risk, access, and the things that matter when they go wrong
Security at Axiom Works is treated as a function, not a checkbox.
Priya Nair
Head of Security & Compliance
Leads all security reviews, access audits, and compliance programmes. Frames concerns in terms of what happens when things go wrong, rather than whether they will. Usually correct. Not someone who appreciates being told about a change after it's already in production.
James Osei
Security Analyst
Handles vulnerability assessments, access reviews, and quarterly compliance reporting. Methodical. Has a spreadsheet for everything, which is not a criticism.
Finance & Administration
The numbers and the people who manage them
A small team that keeps the books, manages the office, and appears on CC lines of emails that involve infrastructure spending.
Derek Ashford
Financial Controller
Manages financial reporting, budget tracking, and vendor contracts. Does not appear at team meetings. Does appear on CC lines of any email that mentions cloud costs, hardware procurement, or infrastructure budget. Always replies-all.
Sandra Wu
HR Manager
Manages hiring, onboarding, and employee relations. Has been with Axiom Works since 2016. Responsible for the onboarding process that new employees go through, which is thorough and takes three days. Sends birthday emails on time, every time.
Owen Blake
Office Manager
Keeps the office running. Manages facilities, supplies, vendor relationships for non-technical services, and the kitchen situation. Has fixed more things than his job title implies. The person you contact if the conference room equipment stops working.