Senior Software Engineer

This position is based in the United States. Candidates must currently reside in the U.S. or willing to relocate to the U.S. We offer relocation assistance and immigration sponsorship where applicable. As part of our interview process, candidates are required to attend a final onsite interview at our San Francisco office.

ABOUT THE ROLE

tl;dr: Fresh off a $15M Series A led by Accel (total funding now $20M+), Agave is experiencing hockey-stick growth. We're looking for a world-class senior full-stack/backend engineer who loves building AI and agent products on top of hard-won data, simplifying complex systems, and making them fast at scale. Learn more about us here (link https://www.figma.com/slides/nlpdpvRj3iS2qbPXqkMQz0/Agave--Candidate-Pitch-Deck?node-id=5-610&t=jDDiUrnFNhn2TWMm-1).

In-person: if you're in the Bay Area, we expect you in our San Francisco office 5 days a week. The role is remote-optional for candidates outside the Bay Area, and we offer a sizable relocation bonus if you want to move here.

WHAT IS AGAVE?

We're building the financial operations platform for construction, a $12T global industry run by software built 20-40 years ago.

We have 550+ customers, 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. We've spent the last five years building the foundational data layers that give us unusually deep access to our customers' financial and project data, across systems that were never built to talk to each other. That's the moat, and you'd be joining right as we ramp up the AI-powered products that sit on top of it. 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, 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, or 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 and diverse: 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 to notice. 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).

Momentum is accelerating: our AI products are the fastest-growing part of the business, with a third of new deals now including one. Channel partnerships are fueling that growth too: we signed 8 new ones in the last month alone.

REQUIREMENTS

• Back-end/full-stack engineer with 6+ years of experience.

• Has designed and built new large-scale systems from scratch and owned them through years of production use.

• Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS) and distributed systems in production: caching, queuing, and data consistency at scale.

• Has debugged hard production issues end-to-end: DB performance, memory, concurrency, third-party API failures.

• Comfortable across the full stack, and able to pick up unfamiliar or legacy systems (SQL, DLLs).

• Has lived through scaling pain: 100x traffic growth, migrations, incident postmortems.

• Has delivered large, ambiguous projects end-to-end, and can explain the tradeoffs to founders and customers, not just engineers.

• 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.

WHAT WE EXPECT FROM YOU

• Own the architecture of major subsystems — a new integration category, sync engine internals, our AI product infrastructure. The design decisions are yours to make and defend.

• Set the patterns the team builds on. Your abstractions become how we build; you influence through design docs, reviews, and tooling.

• Scope and de-risk multi-week projects yourself: identify the unknowns, prototype early, sequence the work.

• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy and tech-debt tradeoffs, and articulate the reasoning clearly.

• Raise the team's technical bar through design reviews, pairing, and mentoring the engineers we