Agave, San Francisco, California
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 engineering manager who still loves to build. You’ll lead a team of strong full-stack engineers shipping AI and agent products on top of IC work yourself.
In-person: This role is in-person from our office in San Francisco 5 days per week.
What is Agave?
Agave builds applied AI for construction, a $12T global industry run on financial software built 20-50 years ago, much of it on-premise with no APIs and no documentation.
We spent 4 years building proprietary rails that read and write across those systems. Our AI agents run on those rails and take over the back-office work contractors still do by hand: invoice matching, expenses, compliance, billing, and financial reporting. Contractors keep the systems they already use; our agents work across them.
550+ contractors run on Agave, including teams building hyperscaler data centers, mass transit systems, and other critical infrastructure. We're backed by Accel and Y Combinator, who both reinvested in our $15M Series A, plus execs from Procore, Autodesk, PlanGrid, and Plaid.
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.
Interesting technical challenges?
AI & agents: this is where most of our new product work is. We're building agents that read, reconcile, and act on construction financial data (invoices, change orders, pay apps, budgets) inside systems that were never designed to be queried. The hard parts are grounding, getting an agent to be right about a customer's actual numbers, evaluating quality when the correct answer lives in a 30-year-old ERP, designing tools over our own APIs, and deciding what should be a deterministic pipeline versus what to leave to a model.
Unification: we unify dozens-to-hundreds of fragmented systems under a single standard that we define: data objects, data models, authentication, account-linking UX, and features like filters and pagination. It's the foundation the AI products sit on, and every new feature has to be designed generically across every system we support and plan to support.
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!).
Tech stack?
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.
At each stage, we decide within 24hrs and update you shortly after.
Intro (20min): 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 speak about your work clearly. You’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Agave makes sense for you.
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.
Coaching Problem (50min): you’ll do a coaching roleplay with one of our team members, working through a realistic situation with an engineer on your team. We want to see how you listen, give direct feedback, and help someone grow.
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 engineering managers 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.
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$100K–$150K / yr
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Source: the Y Combinator job board. We last checked this job 9 h ago. We first saw it 4 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now.
This base pay is above the median for software engineering jobs in the Bay Area with no level in the job title.
We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.