📍In Person (Brooklyn, NYC) | Remote (United States) 💼 $140,000 - $170,000 + Equity
About Holly
Holly is on a mission to bring millions of Americans into public service through software that treats them with hospitality and care
Hiring is a common and addressable pain point across 17,000 local governments in the US, causing 1.1 million vacant government jobs. The average time to hire in the public sector is 135 days, compared to 30 in the private sector, contributing to loss of the best candidates, $85B in annual state and local overtime spending, and declining public service delivery nationwide.
Hiring takes longer because the HR directors and analysts use outdated software - poor outbound recruiting tools and opaque process management and internal visibility are key blockers to progress. In addition, poor data access means that cities struggle with keeping their pay and positions aligned with the market, relying instead on “class & compensation” consultants who provide static and out-of-date salary benchmarking reports that regularly cost $100k or more for midsize cities. The same consultants produce the same reports over and over, while cities fill in the cracks with time-intensive Excel-based intergovernmental surveys.
Holly provides local governments with a better option by building the first AI-native HRIS driving performance and collaboration for governments, revolutionizing hiring in the public sector. At full scale, our product will encompass the employee lifecycle, from recruitment, to onboarding, to performance management, to benefits management, to offboarding. To start, we’re building out our first product, which helps governments design better jobs using cross-agency benchmarking and automated description creation.
Our team brings experience across government, tech startups, and innovation
- Brendan Hellweg managed performance and data science on behalf of the mayor of Baltimore and grew a public health program from 0 to 275 people in under a year during the pandemic that raised $12M from Rockefeller and the federal government. Brendan saw how better collaboration and consistent process management could cut the time to hire for critical roles across field and management staff, and he leverages his networks across government to build inroads with clients and identify their key pain points in the hiring process.
- Cherie Chung was the 8th hire at Propel, where she led initiatives and built systems across business and product that drove 10x revenue growth, the scaling of the product to 5 million users, and the implementation of a $200M cash transfer program during the pandemic. She brings deep expertise in scaling mission-focused tech ventures by building foundational tools and systems for operational excellence and working cross-functionally with engineers, and designers, and customer success staff to drive key outcomes.
Our founding team met as part of Harvard’s MBA / MPP program. Holly was incubated at the Harvard Innovation Labs and is backed by angels that are leaders across the future of work and govtech.
The Role
You would be the founding engineer in a full-time team of 3, working closely alongside our pilot customers to shape and refine the MVP to a product that’s ready for the market.
You will:
- Lead the development of our platform, making strategic decisions about technology stack, architecture, and scalability
- Design and implement integrations with various systems (e.g., APIs, web portals, email systems) to support automated data processing
- Collaborate with the founding team to shape the product roadmap, translating business requirements and customer needs into technical solutions
- Manage and guide external partners (such as contractors) and potentially new engineering hires to meet technical standards and deadlines
- Ensure a high-quality, responsive, and secure application by implementing best practices in software design, testing, and data protection
- Contribute to our company culture as a founding team member, participating in strategic decisions beyond engineering