How to hire a Founding Engineer

• You have paying design partners or early revenue, not just a prototype.
• You can articulate the first three technical bets in one sentence each.
• You have runway for at least twelve months at the target comp band.

• Own the whole stack end to end: infra, backend, frontend, and shipping cadence.
• Set the initial technical bar and codebase conventions.
• Sit in on customer calls and translate feedback into product changes within days.
• Interview and calibrate the next three to five engineers.
• Build an on-call and incident practice that scales past the founding team.

• Shipped a production system from zero to real users in a previous role.
• Comfortable being the only engineer in a room and the accountable owner of a decision.
• Reads and writes cleanly in your primary language and framework.
• High bar on quality without needing a formal spec to move.

• Prior founder or founding-team experience.
• Deep familiarity with your infrastructure stack (e.g. AWS, GCP, Cloudflare).
• Public open-source presence or a body of technical writing.

• Cannot name the last bug they caused in production.
• Describes every previous team as toxic.
• Optimises early for perks, title, and equipment budget.
• Needs a formal spec before writing code.

• Alumni networks of scaled startups in your ecosystem (ex-Stripe, ex-Ramp, ex-Linear, ex-Monzo, ex-Wise).
• Warm second-degree intros from other technical founders — ask each for two names.
• Contributors to open-source projects in your primary stack.
• Angel investors: each should be sending you two names before you close their cheque.

1. 60-minute founder chat, mostly listening for what they want in the next role.
2. Two- to four-hour paid work trial on a real ticket from your backlog.
3. Two reference calls with peers or reports who worked with them recently.
4. Founder-team dinner or long walk — a calibration, not a test.

**Founding Engineer at [Company]**

[One sentence on the market and why now.]

**About the role**
You will be our first engineering hire. You will own the stack end to end, ship the first version of [core product] to real users, and set the bar for every engineer who joins after you.

**In your first 90 days you will**
- Ship [specific first project] to production and to design partners.
- Set the CI/CD, observability, and on-call foundations.
- Sit in on customer calls with the founders and turn the top three requests into shipped changes.

**You are a great fit if you**
- Have shipped a real product from zero at a previous startup or side project.
- Read and write clean [language/framework] and reason about systems as well as UI.
- Move fast without waiting for a formal spec.

**You will love this if you want**
- A whole-product scope, not a narrow ticket queue.
- Direct customer contact and product influence.
- Real equity: [x.x]%–[y.y]% with double-trigger acceleration.

**Compensation**
[Base] + [equity] + [benefits].

**Location**
[Remote / London / New York / hybrid], with quarterly meet-ups.