Software Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE tl;dr: Fresh off a $15M Series A led by Accel (total funding now $20M+), Agave is profitable, growing fast, and scaling the team. We're looking for a world-class full-stack/backend engineer who loves simplifying complex systems, unifying fragmented data, and building products 0->1. Learn more about us here (link https://www.figma.com/slides/nlpdpvRj3iS2qbPXqkMQz0/Agave--Candidate-Pitch-Deck?node-id=5-610&t=jDDiUrnFNhn2TWMm-1). WHAT IS AGAVE? We're building the financial ops platform for construction, a $12T global industry run by software built 20-40 years ago, much of it on-prem with no APIs and no documentation. We spent 3 years building the rails to read and write across those systems, and we use them to deploy AI for invoicing, expenses, compliance, billing, and more. We have 550+ customers and have been profitable & cashflow positive for over two years. We're backed by Accel and Y Combinator, with investors from Procore, Autodesk, and Plaid. Our three co-founders have worked together for 12+ years, across Graphiq (acquired by Amazon in 2017) and Amazon. We’ve built something people actually need, in a market most of Silicon Valley ignores — which is exactly why we’re winning. The only thing slowing us down is hiring. Our team is small, scrappy, and high-caliber, and we’re looking for the next wave of builders who will help take Agave from breakout startup to category-defining company. WHY JOIN US? - Early-stage, yet de-risked: we are a rare combo of being early stage (high upside) but lower risk (thousands of contractors using us, profitable + cash-flow positive for over a year, hockey-stick growth). You get the benefits of an early stage startup without the risk you’ll have at almost any other startup. You’ll have a ton of impact, work directly with our customers, and get to work on interesting technical challenges you won’t see at bigger companies. Although we’re early stage, we’ve eliminated key strategic risks you’ll face at other startups. Like an unproven product, lack of market validation, lack of revenue, over-reliance on VC funding, co-founder disputes. We’re all young and hungry. Most of us moved to SF from far away (Canada, SoCal, Texas, Virginia) specifically to build Agave from the ground up. - Team is technical, diverse, young: you'll work with a formidable founding team that's experienced, intense, and ambitious. The cofounders worked together for 10 years, first at a startup that Amazon acquired, then at Amazon, and now at Agave. You'll learn a ton while having outsized ownership. You’ll have a front-row seat to the good and bad of building a company from the ground up. - Huge opportunity without direct competition: startups are incredibly hard, so you want to join one that has a unique advantage. You don’t want to spend years of your life on a company in a saturated market with tons of competition. We’re seizing an opportunity that’s massive (Construction is the world’s third-largest industry) but also overlooked by most people in startup land. Most who can solve this problem aren’t aware it exists or are too distracted by tech trends (blockchain, metaverse, LLMs, etc.) to notice. These talented folks get coaxed into building products that seem cool early on, but don’t solve durable problems or aren’t differentiated enough against their many competitors to be sustainable (e.g. lots of AI products), so they end-up not going anywhere or stagnating without a clear plan to grow profitably. As a result, we have a multi-year head start against potential competitors, increasing our odds of success significantly. We’re also backed by world-class investors (Accel, YC) and Construction insiders (Procore and Autodesk executives, founders of the largest construction tech companies like PlanGrid). REQUIREMENTS - Back-end/full-stack engineer, ideally with 1-4 years experience (we're open to exceptional college grads with strong intern/co-op experience). - Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS). - Self-motivated, high ownership, low ego; desire to work on a fast-paced, intense, fun team. Excited to be our next hire; passion for building a world-class engineering culture. - If in Bay Area: pumped to work in-person with us in SF 5 days/week. This role is remote optional for candidates outside of the Bay Area. - No need to have: prior experience with our tech stack or at B2B SaaS/API company INTERESTING TECHNICAL CHALLENGES? - Unification: we’re unifying dozens-to-hundreds of fragmented systems under a single standard that we define. Our unification covers data objects, data models, authentication, account-linking UX, and features like filters and pagination. When designing any new feature, we have to do it in a scalable way. For example, when adding filters, we have to research each system we support (and plan to support) and create a generic, system-agnostic solution. - On-prem: we’re connecting with many types of on-prem systems (SQL-based, DLL-based, API-based), many built 20-40 years ago. We provide tremendous value to customers allowing them to interface with these systems in a secure, fast, reliable way, as if they’re modern, cloud-based products. We need to support real-time communication and webhooks when they don’t exist (e.g., using web-sockets). - Scale & speed: we’re handling millions of API requests per day, and growing daily. For our products that we power with our own API (e.g. Analytics), we need to store and retrieve large amounts of data in an efficient way, building elegant caching layers to reduce latency. We ship code daily and iterate quickly based on actual feedback from paying customers (they share tons!). - Operational excellence: we’re creating a reliable API layer on top of many old systems that don’t have APIs. It’s like building a skyscraper on quicksand, enforced by SLAs. We need to innovate in expanding the depth and breadth of our integrations while simultaneously increasing our development velocity. We need to be very creative in how to continually test our code and integrations, creating scalable testing frameworks that can catch edge cases and bugs across 1k+ endpoints. - Mix of back-end and front-end: we’re building front-end apps that dog-food our own APIs (e.g. Sync, Analytics). This helps us build world-class APIs because we suffer any pain present in our API. We’re building both the lego blocks and the higher-level lego models: we see what kinds of APIs our SaaS customers want, then also look at the kinds of API niceties we want for our own applications (like a caching layer, advanced filtering) and implement a combination of the two. - Variety: without knowing, you might assume adding a new integration is low-ambiguity and routine. But each integration we launch is special, completely different and posing unique challenges. This requires researching that system and its nuances in great depth before building on top of it. It’s part engineering, part archeology. TECH STACK? - TypeScript, React, Redis, Postgres, AWS - CDK, EC2 BENEFITS - Healthcare: we cover 90% of your healthcare costs with several plan options. - 401k: we match 100% of your contributions, up to 4% of annual salary. - Performance Bonuses: we offer annual performance bonuses when we hit company growth goals, which are a % of your base salary. These are large, meaningful rewards that scale with the amount we grow in a particular year. - Relocation: sizable relocation bonus for folks currently located outside of the Bay Area, and a bonus for anyone (even within the Bay Area) who moves within a 15-minute walk of our office. - Breakfast & Dinner, delivered: breakfast and dinner stipends through DoorDash. Plus a kitchen stocked with coffee, snacks, drinks, and more. - Gym: on-site gym with Peloton, squat rack, Tempo, Yoga setup, and more. - Visa: we sponsor Visas (H1B, TN, etc.) for candidates who are a good fit! - Commuter benefits: employees can make pre-tax contributions toward commuting costs, and we'll cover the full cost of a Muni pass for those using public transit. - Office Visits: we will provide company-sponsored trips to our HQ in SF at least every other month. We’ll coordinate trips for other remote employees to coincide during “remote visit” weeks to maximize your touchpoints with teammates. OUR OFFICE - We've built Agave in-person since day 1, and will maintain an in-person culture in San Francisco going forward for candidates in the Bay Area. We also will provide a significant relocation bonus for candidates who want to move to the Bay Area. - Our office is at 101 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, right near Salesforce Park, coffee shops & restaurants, and a bustling downtown. We believe building in-person is a huge strategic advantage, and we hope you’ll join us. ABOUT THE INTERVIEW PROCESS At each stage, we decide within 24hrs and update you shortly after. - Intro (15min): informal chat for you to learn more about the role. We'll ask for details on past projects. We want to know that you can code, and speak about your work clearly. You’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Agave makes sense for you. - Coding (50min): you'll meet with one of our Founding SWEs. They’ll ask you 1-2 coding questions in your language of preference. We’ll test how you write, test, and debug solutions, and identify tradeoffs. - Screen 3 (50 min): - >3 years of experience: Customer Needs Problem (50min): we'll ask you to design a feature to meet a customer need based on one of our actual application components. You'll do the work to understand the requirements, translate those to specs, and iterate on the solution as you learn more about the customer's needs. This will intentionally have more ambiguity than a typical coding-style question. - <3 years of experience: Behavioral Interview (50 min): we’ll ask you a series of behavioral interview questions to understand how you approach problems, collaborate, and communicate. - On-site (60min x 5, all 1:1 interviews) [In-Person in SF, we pay for the trip]: you'll interview with each co-founder and our lead dev. This will be a deeper dive into your technical abilities and overall fit. Each interview is 1hr, 45min for our questions and 15min for yours.