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 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.

Requirements

4+ years as a back-end/full-stack engineer, including 1+ years managing or leading engineers (as a manager, or as a tech lead with mentoring responsibility).

A strong IC who wants to stay one: you’ve designed and built production systems yourself, with real experience in cloud infrastructure (e.g. AWS) and distributed systems.

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

Has led projects with other engineers: scoped the work, split it across the team, and delivered it.

Has mentored engineers and given direct feedback, including the hard conversations.

Can explain tradeoffs to founders and customers, not just engineers.