Founding Data Engineer at Holly in New York, NY

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 our Founding Data Engineer to build the data backbone of Holly. Local governments publish enormous amounts of public information — salary schedules, job classifications, MOUs, budgets — but it's scattered across thousands of websites and buried in messy formats: scanned PDFs, inconsistent HTML, spreadsheets, and everything in between. Turning that chaos into clean, trustworthy, structured data is our single biggest data challenge and one of our deepest moats.
• You'll design and build the data platform: the pipelines and systems that ingest public government data at scale, normalize and validate it, and serve it as clean, canonical datasets the rest of Holly's product builds on as its source of truth. Over time, you'll make this platform increasingly automated and intelligent — less manual wrangling, more self-healing, monitored, high-quality pipelines.
• This is a hands-on, high-ownership building role. As the first data hire on a small engineering team, you'll set the direction, make the architecture calls, and establish the standards for how Holly collects, models, and trusts its data for years to come. You'll work directly with the founders and partner closely with our product engineers - your job is to make sure they always have the clean, reliable data they need to build features.
• If you've worked with large, high-volume data and love the challenge of taming messy real-world inputs into something people can rely on, we'd love to talk.

What you'll do

You'll be our founding data engineer and a core partner to the founding team - owning the data platform end to end, making high-leverage technical decisions, and building the foundation the rest of the product depends on.

• Own and Build the Data Platform
• • Own the data platform end-to-end — from raw public sources to clean, canonical datasets the product consumes
    • Design the architecture, schemas, and standards for how Holly ingests, models, and trusts its data
    • Partner with the founders to scope work, make tradeoffs, and drive delivery on our highest-leverage data initiatives
    • Set the long-term direction for our data foundation as the first data hire
• Build Ingestion & Normalization Pipelines
• • Build systems that collect large volumes of public government data from thousands of local-government sources across the web
    • Turn messy, heterogeneous inputs — scanned PDFs, inconsistent HTML, spreadsheets — into structured, normalized data (parsing, extraction, OCR, dedupe, entity resolution, schema mapping)
    • Where it adds leverage, incorporate LLM-assisted extraction and embeddings into the pipeline
    • Build for freshness, reliability, and scale so data stays current and trustworthy
• Model & Serve Data for the Product
• • Design canonical data models and domain schemas that product engineers build on
• • Expose clean, versioned, well-documented datasets the main app can reliably consume
• • Own data quality, validation, lineage, and observability so downstream teams can trust what they're building on
• Make It Automated & Intelligent
• • Evolve pipelines from manual/one-off toward automated, self-healing, monitored systems
    • Establish data-quality checks, alerting, and standards that keep the platform reliable as it grows
    • Raise the bar on how we collect, validate, and serve data across the company

How we work

Six principles drive how we build. We keep the list short: if a principle wouldn't change a decision, we cut it:

• Work on What Matters, Default to No — every yes has a cost, so we save them for what moves the business.
• Question Everything, Be Opinionated — titles don't settle arguments; the better case wins. Push on the requirement, then take a position.
• Obsess Over Craft — quality first, and we don't trade it for a date. If you wouldn't put your name on it, it doesn't ship.
• Own It End to End — if you build it, you own it: to production, in tests, and when it breaks. "Done" means live, not merged.
• Ship Small, Ship Often — the smallest thing that stands on its own, kept reversible. Small ships compound.
• Automate the Hurt, Not the Itch — automate the recurring pain, not the one-off annoyance, and do the math first.

What you'll have

We'd love to talk if you're a strong data engineer with high ownership who has worked with large, high-volume data and knows how to turn messy real-world inputs into clean, trustworthy datasets.

Required

• Are a senior data engineer with a strong track record building and operating production data systems (several years of relevant experience or equivalent)

• Have worked with large-scale, high-volume data — ideally where lots of sources, users, or records make volume and reliability matter

• Are strong at data modeling and SQL, with experience designing schemas that others build on (Postgres a plus)

• Have built and owned ETL/ELT pipelines that handle messy, heterogeneous, real-world inputs (scraped data, PDFs, HTML, spreadsheets)

• Bring a strong data-quality mindset — validation, testing, monitoring, lineage, and reliability are core to how you work

• 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 collaboration and clear standards

• Are pragmatic about tooling and comfortable working in (or ramping quickly into) a modern TypeScript/Postgres codebase

Bonus Points

• Experience with large-scale web scraping / crawling, document extraction (OCR), or LLM-assisted parsing

• Experience with embeddings / vector search or supporting ML/AI data workflows

• Experience with analytical/columnar or warehouse stacks (ClickHouse, BigQuery, Snowflake) and/or streaming pipelines

• Comfort in TypeScript/Node (our stack)

• Experience in government, public sector, or civic tech

• Prior early-stage startup experience

Don't meet every bullet? Apply anyways. If you're strong on most of this and excited about the work, we want to hear from you. We'll help you ramp on the rest.

What you'll get

• Foundational ownership — Architect and build the data platform that will define our product and data model for years.
• Technical influence — Make the high-leverage calls on data architecture, standards, and how we scale.
• High-impact scope — Build the data foundation the entire product depends on, and see it power features customers rely on quickly.
• Public-service impact — Your work improves how local governments operate, helping millions of Americans access public-service careers.
• Competitive package — $170K - $216K base, 0.15–0.4% equity (L3), comprehensive health benefits (platinum plan, vision, 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 real 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 🌆

http://www.hollygov.com

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.