Founding Engineer (Senior)

tl;dr: we're looking for world-class engineers who love solving hard backend problems in unifying fragmented data, building a high-scale API, and simplifying complexity for fellow developers.

Why Join Us

• Opportunity: you have the chance to be an early, pivotal member of a fast-growing YC startup modernizing one of the world's largest industries (construction).
• Team: you'll work with a world-class founding team that's experienced, intense, and ambitious. We've 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.
• Timing: you're joining at a key inflection point. We're proven (we've grown revenue 4x year over year, have 65+ customers) but also early. This means you have lower risk but also huge upside.

Requirements

• Back-end/full-stack engineer with 6+ years experience building complex systems quickly, and expertise with cloud infrastructure and multi-tenant systems.
• 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.
• Pumped to work in-person with us in SF 5 days/week.
• No need to have: prior experience with our tech stack or at B2B SaaS/dev tools companies

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.

Tech Stack

• Backend: PHP Laravel...why?
  • We have extensive experience using PHP to scale Alexa's NLP to 100M users.
  • From YC: https://youtu.be/rP7bpYsfa6Q?t=992
  • Good HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35896954
• Frontend: TypeScript, React
• Infra: Redis, Postgres, AWS - CDK, EC2

Benefits

• Healthcare: we cover 90% of your healthcare costs with several plan options.
• 401k: we match 100% of your contributions, up to 4% of annual salary.
• Workspace: $1,500 to spend on items like chairs, desks, monitors, etc.
• Relocation: sizable relocation bonus for folks currently located outside of the Bay Area.
• Gym: on-site gym with Peloton, squat rack, Tempo, Yoga setup, and more.
• Visa: we sponsor Visas (H1B, TN, etc.) for candidates who are a good fit!

At each stage, we decide within 24hrs and update you shortly after.

• Intro (15min.) [Virtual]: 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 code, and speak about your work clearly. You’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Agave makes sense for you.

• Experience (30min.) [Virtual] : we'll dive into the details of your most technically complex or challenging projects. Our goal is to ensure you've worked on sufficiently challenging projects to ensure you'll be successful if you join us full-time. We'll also reserve 5-10min to answer any questions you have about Agave.

• Coding (40-60min.): [Virtual] : you'll meet with our CTO. He’ll ask you 1-2 coding questions in your language of preference. We’ll test how you write, test, and debug solutions, and identify tradeoffs.

• On-site (1hr x 5 people): [In-Person]: you'll interview with each co-founder and our lead dev. 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.