Agave is an AI platform for construction financials that automates accounting and back-office workflows for contractors.
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 increa