Staff Software Engineer, Product

Holly is the HR platform built for city and county government. We help local governments modernize how they hire, classify, and manage their workforce — work that directly shapes public services for millions of people. Our platform is live across 12 states with 60+ jurisdictions representing over 10% of the US population, including major counties like Santa Clara and Contra Costa in the Bay Area, Orange County in LA, and Snohomish County in Washington State. Demand is outpacing our team, and we're building to meet it.

Holly is a seed-stage team of 20+ operators with deep roots in public service, civic tech, and AI. We’ve raised $10M from leading investors in government technology and the future of work and have grown over 100X in the last year. We center public servants and impact in every decision, and we bring that same care to how we work here at Holly.

About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer, Product to set technical direction across the product Holly runs on. You'll own architecture that spans the data model, backend, frontend, and AI systems, then help teams turn that direction into features local governments use every day.

This is a hands-on, full-stack building role in a modern TypeScript stack: React with TanStack Start and Next.js across the frontend and backend (we prefer TanStack and are moving that way) Postgres for the data model, and the pipelines that turn messy government inputs into product experiences people can rely on. AI is central to the product: you'll build agentic and LLM-powered features with the Vercel AI SDK, VoltAgent, and similar frameworks/tools. You'll make the architecture calls, set the quality bar, and move fast without breaking the things customers depend on.

You'll work directly with the founders, resolve architecture decisions that cross teams, and make other engineers more effective. If you're a Staff engineer who wants to own a product domain, de-risk the hardest decisions, and raise the engineering bar through systems and people, we'd love to talk.

What You'll Do

You'll own the technical health of major product domains, lead cross-team decisions, and help engineers ship features customers are actively asking for.

Own and Ship Core Product

• Own features end-to-end, from idea to production data model, backend, frontend, and rollout
• Partner with the founders to scope work, make tradeoffs, and drive delivery
• Lead high-impact projects that directly unlock customer value and revenue
• Set technical direction for major initiatives tradeoffs, sequencing, and the quality bar

Build Across the Full Stack

Ship production features across our stack, front to back:

• React with TanStack (Start, Query) our preferred stack, and where we're headed
• TypeScript, end-to-end even infrastructure is via Pulumi
• AI and agents LLM features, tool-calling, and agentic workflows (Vercel AI SDK, Vercel Eve, VoltAgent)
• Postgres Drizzle
• Background jobs and durable workflows / workers (e.g. Trigger.dev)
• shadcn/ui Tailwind
• Dash0, Sentry for monitoring & observability

Build AI Into the Product

• Build LLM-powered and agentic features retrieval, tool-calling, structured extraction, and streaming
• Work in our AI stack and set the patterns for how we build AI at Holly
• Make AI features dependable: evaluation, guardrails, and handling non-deterministic model output

Build Data-Rich Product Experiences

• Design pipelines that ingest, validate, and normalize messy government workforce data
• Build fast, usable interfaces over large datasets search, filter, and performance-minded rendering
  Turn imperfect real-world inputs into product surfaces people trust

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Set strong defaults through code review, reliability and monitoring, and CI/CD
• Establish pragmatic standards that keep us shipping fast without breaking things testing where it matters, clean interfaces, docs

How We Work

Six principles drive how we build:

• Work on What Matters, Default to No every yes has a cost, so we save them for what moves the business and spend time on what matters.
• Question Everything, Be Opinionated titles don't settle arguments, the better case wins. Feel empowered to push back to everyone from the Head of Engineering to one of the founders.
• Obsess Over Craft quality first, and we don't trade it for a date. If you wouldn't put your name on it, it shouldn'''t end up in the codebase.
• Own It End to End if you build it, you own it: to production, in tests, and when it breaks. With great power comes great responsibility, with autonomy comes responsibility to make sure you own your work.
• Ship Small, Ship Often the smallest thing that stands on its own, kept reversible. Small ships compound, are easier to review and easier to fix if there are issues.
• Automate the Hurt, Not the Itch automate the recurring pain, the Toil aka things you do repeatedly that waste time, not the one‑off annoyances or what seems ''"fun"" to automate.

What You’ll Have

We'd love to talk if you're a Staff product engineer who has owned a product domain across teams and can turn ambiguous company problems into clear technical direction.

The Essentials

• Have 8+ years building and shipping production software, or equivalent experience, including sustained Staff-level scope across a product domain
• Are a strong full-stack engineer: you work across both sides of the stack backend design and clean APIs, data modeling in Postgres, and modern React on the frontend
• Have shipped modern React TanStack (Router, Query) and/or Next.js (App Router, server components and actions) and care about performance, DX, and maintainability
• Have built AI / LLM-powered features in production agents, RAG, tool-calling, or streaming. This is central to the role; experience with the Vercel AI SDK, VoltAgent, or Mastra is ideal
• Have owned systems used by customers building, operating, and improving them over time
• Have built data-heavy product surfaces (search / filter / pagination) and are comfortable working with imperfect real-world data
• Take ownership and move fast you work independently, ship often, and thrive in early‑stage ambiguity
• Have a growth mindset you learn quickly and raise the bar through code review and collaboration

Bonus Points

• Open source contributions to or maintainer of a widely used tool.
• Deep experience with TanStack (Router, Query, Start)
• Experience with background jobs, durable workflows, and workers at scale (Trigger.dev, Temporal, or similar)
• Experience building and maintaining a design system or component library
• Experience with messy data ingestion scraping, document extraction, or LLM-assisted parsing
• Comfort owning reliability: monitoring, alerting, and incident response
• Experience in government, public sector, or civic tech
• Prior early‑stage startup experience and maybe you want to be a founder someday; this is an early‑team seat

What You’ll Get

• Foundational ownership . Architect and build core systems that will define our product and data model for years.
• Commitment to Open Source . We are big believers in supporting open source, and provide a monthly day of Open Source where you can work on your favorite tool. In addition to internal hackathons and other projects
• Technical influence . Make the high‑leverage calls on architecture, standards, and how we scale.
• Founder‑level access . Work directly with the founders, with autonomy to drive major initiatives end‑to‑end.
• High‑impact scope . Ship features customers urgently need and see them used in production quickly.
• Public‑service impact . Your work improves how local governments operate, helping millions of Americans access public‑service careers.
• Competitive package . $202k-$262k base, 0.25-0.60% equity (L4), comprehensive health benefits (platinum plan with vision and dental), 401(k), paid parental leave, and a professional development stipend.

Ready to Join Us? A few important notes:

Location: This is an onsite role based out of our New York City HQ, four days a week (typically Mondays Thursdays), with some flexibility depending on the role and the candidate. Candidates must reside in New York or be able to commute to our NYC office. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without requiring sponsorship.

Work Philosophy: We're an early‑stage startup serving government clients with hard deadlines. There may be occasional off‑hours work around launches or critical issues (rare and typically planned). We value flexibility and trust you to manage your schedule while maintaining a high bar for responsiveness and customer outcomes.

We're excited to build with you

Team Holly

Holly is committed to building a diverse company and working with the broadest talent pool possible. We encourage applications from all races, religions, national origins, genders, sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions, and ages, as well as veterans and individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, let us know.