Senior Software Engineer

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 8 states with 35+ jurisdictions representing nearly 5% of the US population, including major counties like Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Orange County, and Snohomish. Demand is outpacing our team, and we're building to meet it. Holly is a 15-person team with deep roots in public service, civic / gov tech, and AI, backed by $2.2M from leading investors in government technology and the future of work, including J2 Ventures, Roble Ventures, and Gaingels.

We build for the people we serve, centering public servants and impact in every decision, and we bring that same care to how we work here at Holly.

• We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join Holly as we scale the AI-powered platform helping local governments design and manage their workforce. You’ll be the fifth engineer on the team and will own major parts of our product and technical foundation.
• This is a hands‑on building role: you’ll design and ship end‑to‑end features in our Next.js + Type Script stack, model complex government workforce data in Postgres, and build reliable pipelines that turn messy external inputs into trustworthy, usable product experiences. You’ll make pragmatic architecture decisions, raise the quality bar, and help us move fast without breaking things.
• If you’re a senior engineer who wants real ownership - shipping end‑to‑end, making architecture calls, and setting the engineering bar as one of the earliest engineers - this role is for you. You’ll work directly with the founders, build core systems that will define the product for years, and have the autonomy to move fast while still building things the “right” way.
  
  If you’re excited by ambiguous problems, real‑world workflows, and turning messy inputs into a product people rely on, we’d love to talk.

As an early engineer at Holly, you'll own major parts of the product, make high‑leverage technical decisions, and ship features customers are actively asking for.

• You'll own and ship core product :
• Own end‑to‑end features from idea → production (data model, backend, frontend, rollout)
• Partner closely with product and customers to scope work, make tradeoffs, and drive delivery
• Lead high‑impact projects that directly unlock customer value and revenue
• Drive technical direction for major initiatives (tradeoffs, sequencing, quality bar)
• You'll build and maintain production features across the stack :
• Next.js (App Router, Server Actions, Edge) on Vercel
• Type Script
• Background jobs / async workflows (Redis + BullMQ)
• Sentry
• You'll raise the engineering bar :
• Set strong defaults via code review, reliability/monitoring, and CI/CD improvements
• Establish pragmatic standards that keep us shipping fast without breaking things (testing where it matters, clean interfaces, lightweight docs)

• We’d love to talk if you’re a strong builder with high ownership and solid product judgment. In particular, we’ve seen success with two types of senior engineers:
• Senior full-stack engineers with deep Next.js/Type Script experience who can immediately own our web stack end‑to‑end (server‑side React, modern Next patterns, performance‑minded UI for large datasets).
• Senior engineers with strong ownership/architecture/reliability experience who may be lighter on Next.js, but can ramp quickly while bringing senior technical judgment (data modeling, scalable systems, observability, and pragmatic tradeoffs).
• ~4–6+ years building and shipping production software (or equivalent experience)
• A proven track record owning systems used by real customers (building, operating, and improving them over time)
• Strength in full‑stack fundamentals: backend design + clean APIs, data modeling, and pragmatic architecture decisions
• Experience shipping modern React/Next.js (or can ramp quickly); care for performance, DX, and maintainability
• Experience building data‑heavy product surfaces before (search/filter/pagination) and comfort working with imperfect…