Staff Software Engineer, Product

Holly • New York, NY

4h • $202,000 - $262,000 • Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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

Nice To Haves

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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 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 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

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed