Software Engineer (Remote)

The Opportunity

tl;dr: we're looking for a world-class engineer who loves simplifying complex systems, unifying fragmented data, and building high-scale backend systems. Learn more about us here (link [https://www.figma.com/slides/nlpdpvRj3iS2qbPXqkMQz0/Agave--Candidate-Pitch-Deck?node-id=13780-1628&t=unNNVxtvzNv9UZlP-1]).

About the Company

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'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.

Founded in 2021, team size around 40 employees, $20.5M in total funding raised.

About the Team

Why join us? Early-stage, yet de-risked: we are a rare combo of being early stage (high upside) but lower risk (5XX+ paying customers, $Xm+ recurring revenue, 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. Our team is in-person, tenacious, and committed - 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 team that's experienced and ambitious. Our cofounders have 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. 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).

A platform that compounds: After years of building and developing key partnerships in the industry, Agave has proprietary integrations with every major construction ERP and project management platform that would take any competitor years to replicate.

Role responsibilities

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.

The Product

Agave is the financial ops platform for construction, a $12 trillion global industry still running on software built 20–40 years ago, much of it on-prem with no APIs and no documentation.

Every contractor faces the same problem: their business-critical systems don't talk to each other. Field data, finance data, and project data live in silos, leading to errors, double-entry, delays, and wasted money. Teams spend hours reconciling spreadsheets, chasing down missing information, and struggling to build a single source of truth for their projects and finances.

Agave spent three years building the rails to read and write across these legacy systems, creating the connective tissue for construction tech. The platform eliminates double-entry and delays by keeping field, finance, and project data in sync across the business-critical systems contractors rely on - ERPs, accounting software, job costing tools, and more.

On top of that data infrastructure, Agave deploys AI-powered automation for invoicing, expenses, compliance, billing, and other financial workflows - turning what used to be manual, error-prone processes into streamlined operations.

The platform serves a multi-product offering: a core data syncing product plus three additional products that can be purchased independently or together, enabling a consultative, platform-style sale that matches products to specific contractor pain points.

Typical deal sizes are around $15K with a fast, high-velocity sales cycle (2–3 call close), driven heavily through inbound demand, channel partners, and co-selling motions.

With 500+ customers and growing, Agave has been profitable and cash-flow positive for over two year, a rare milestone for a startup at this stage.

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Application Questions

1. When can you start?
2. What are your expectations around comp?
3. What’s motivating you to explore roles outside of {current company}?
4. In your next role, what's your ideal day to day work?
5. Are you open to relocating and working with us in-person in SF?