Customer Solutions Engineer (CSE)

tl;dr Fresh off a $15M Series A led by Accel (total funding now $20M+), Agave is profitable, growing fast, and scaling the team. We’re hiring a smart generalist to become an expert on our product and lead customer implementations. You’ll guide customers through their Agave journey. This is a unique opportunity to learn a complex b2b product, build long-term relationships with customers, drive sales growth, work closely with engineers, and join a fast-growing team going from $Xm to $XXm in revenue. Note: no need to have construction/finance experience. No need to have technical skills, although clear ability to learn quickly through intensive training is critical (see below). WHAT IS AGAVE? We're building the financial ops platform for construction, a $12T global industry run by software built 20-40 years ago, much of it on-prem with no APIs and no documentation. We spent 3 years building the rails to read and write across those systems, and we use them to deploy AI for invoicing, expenses, compliance, billing, and more. We have 550+ customers and have been profitable & cashflow positive for over two years. We're 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. 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 ARE WE HIRING THIS ROLE? - We’re growing 10% month-over-month. We’re closing and onboarding 5-8 new customers per week. We simply can’t manage this pace going forward with our current headcount. - By hiring for this role, we will expand our capacity to run more sales demos and onboard more customers in a shorter period. This will enable us to sign more customers faster and release a constraint holding us back from hitting our aggressive growth goals this year. - You will wear many hats in addition to leading customer implementations, including: - Solutions Engineer: you’ll understand our customer’s needs and configure our tool so it integrates seamlessly with their systems of record (e.g. ERP). You’ll be forced to get scrappy, creative, and technical to figure out solutions to unexpected needs and to troubleshoot quirks that arise. - Customer Success: you’ll build deep relationships with our customers and manage renewal cycles, expansions, and support escalations to ensure they remain happy with our product. - Product Manager: you’ll work 1:1 with our customers and observe implicit and explicit feedback they provide when using our product. You’ll capture that input, synthesize it, and work with our engineering team to prioritize improvements that make our implementations faster and easier. - Sales Engineer: you’ll serve as the technical expert in early sales conversations — leading demos with prospective customers and guiding them through how Agave will solve their specific pain points. RESPONSIBILITIES - Customer Discovery - work with our Sales team to lead technical demos: - Guide prospects through how Agave works - Answer technical questions and position our product in the context of their systems - Customer Onboarding — own customer onboardings end-to-end (alongside other teammates): - Lead customers from sales handoff to full implementation efficiently, working with them 1:1 - Be their primary point of contact and assume full accountability for their onboarding - Understand their goals and configure our product to meet their specific needs - Train them on how to use Agave (e.g. integrate their data, perform common actions, handle edge cases) - Create and maintain comprehensive docs for implementation best practices and FAQs - Build strong customer relationships and long-term loyalty - Identify churn risks and upsell opportunities - Project Management — project-manage each customer’s implementation; manage many at once: - Create and share detailed implementation plans, timelines, milestones, open issues, and remaining steps - Troubleshoot issues that arise, working with our product and engineering teams if new features are needed - Proactively identify and escalate implementation risks; work with cofounders to solve them - Identify feedback, requests, and weak areas of our product; share with our team to drive our product roadmap - Work with external partners (e.g. sales partners, resellers, consultants) to align onboarding timelines across parties and systems - Process Improvement - build tooling, templates, and automation to scale onboarding across hundreds of customers: - Understand the variations in our current processes and key gaps that hinder onboarding - Create a standardized and scalable process that works for hundreds of customers - Create customer education materials (e.g. demo videos) to reduce manual effort required by us - Work with product/engineering to build features that improve customer onboardings - Define + own + improve internal tracking mechanisms and KPIs for customer onboarding timelines WHAT WE LOOK FOR - Must have: - 1+ year of experience in a customer-facing role - Experience at a SaaS startup (highly preferred) OR experience at a top consulting firm / elite company with clear interest in joining an early-stage startup - Aptitude or demonstrated skill in these areas: - Structured troubleshooting: knowing how to debug issues in software in a structured, methodical way - Systems thinking: understanding concepts like data types, functional modules, system constraints, and data inter-dependencies - Context-specific communication: producing crisp, customer-safe updates with facts, next steps, and timelines, that pivot context based on audience (e.g. cutsomer CFOs vs. internal engineers) - Nice to have: - Hands-on experience with b2b SaaS software implementations - Hands-on experience demoing SaaS software to potential customers - Familiarity with the construction industry - Experience with accounting concepts - Experience working with APIs, SQL, Postman, or similar tools - No need to have: - Experience with Construction or at B2B SaaS/dev tools companies - Key traits: - Project Management: you have elite project management and organization skills; you can manage many customer implementations (e.g. 15+) at once and are extremely detail oriented - Customer-Facing: you are excellent with people; you have a high degree of empathy, patience, and relatability that makes building relationships and rapport with our customers easy - Energized by People: you will work 1:1 with customers on Zoom most of your day; you are energized by building relationships and helping customers accomplish their goals - Process Oriented: you will work with many similar users doing similar things; you love thinking about how to make good processes even better - Curious: no construction experience required, but you should be able to learn industry jargon and answer in-depth questions from construction CFOs within 3 months of starting 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. - Performance Bonuses: we offer annual performance bonuses when we hit company growth goals, which are a % of your base salary. These are large, meaningful rewards that scale with the amount we grow in a particular year. - Relocation: sizable relocation bonus for folks currently located outside of the Bay Area, and a bonus for anyone (even within the Bay Area) who moves within a 15-minute walk of our office. - Breakfast & Dinner, delivered: breakfast and dinner stipends through DoorDash. Plus a kitchen stocked with coffee, snacks, drinks, and more. - 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! - Commuter benefits: employees can make pre-tax contributions toward commuting costs, and we'll cover the full cost of a Muni pass for those using public transit. IN-PERSON - We've built Agave in-person since day 1, and will maintain an in-person culture in San Francisco going forward. We form tighter bonds, build a stronger culture, and move faster since we're all working from one location. - 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. ABOUT THE INTERVIEW At each stage, we decide and update you within 24hrs: 1. Intro (15min): informal chat for you to learn more about the role. We'll ask for details on your past projects and what you're looking for next. We want to know that you meet our basic requirements and can speak about your work clearly. You’re welcome to ask lots of questions about whether working at Agave makes sense for you. 2. Writing Exercise (45min): we provide two short prompts that you reply to in a Google Doc. Our goal is to quickly decide whether you understand our business and can write clearly, with minimum time required from you. 3. Experience (30min): we'll dive into the details of your recent work experience, asking questions to learn about what you've done. Our goal is to ensure you've worked on sufficiently complex projects to confirm you'll be successful if you join us full-time. We'll also reserve time to answer any questions you have about Agave. 4. Mock call (30min): an Agave co-founder will play “customer” and you will troubleshoot a syncing issue as the Solutions Engineer. We provide detailed directions in a Google doc. No prior onboarding experience needed for this call. 5. 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 other members of our team. This will be a deeper dive into your experience and overall fit. Each interview is about 1hr, 45min for our questions and 15min for yours. #LI-Onsite #LI-TR1