Founding Frontend Software Engineer

We are looking for a Founding Frontend Software Engineer with 3+ years of experience to help build and scale Agave’s product suite. We are seeking a senior, product-minded engineer with great frontend practices to build new, customer-facing products from scratch. This is a unique opportunity to own meaningful product surface area, help shape the frontend foundations of a fast-growing startup, and provide leadership and direction to a backend-leaning engineering team.

What will you be doing?

• Build and ship frontend experiences for new products across Agave’s platform, including AP Automation and Vendor Management.

• Refactor and modernize existing frontend code to improve performance, maintainability, and developer velocity.

• Collaborate closely with backend engineers and product managers to translate real-world customer workflows into thoughtful UI.

• Establish and evolve frontend patterns, components, and best practices as the product surface area scales.

• Own the end-to-end implementation of user-facing features, from early product concepts through production-ready interfaces.

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.