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.

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 Type Script stack:
React with Tan Stack Start and Next.js across the frontend and backend (we prefer Tan Stack 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, Volt Agent, 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.

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 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

Ship production features across our stack, front to back:

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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…