Get your first few engineers wrong, and reaching your next funding round gets a lot harder. But the difference between a strong engineer and the wrong engineer has less to do with the tech and more to do with the kind of person you’re bringing on.
How to Recognize the Right Engineer
The single most important trait of a strong early hire is not technical capability. It’s knowing what it takes to get to the next funding round. The best place to find that person? In the trenches of a startup, building something from the ground up.
In the words of our very own Sam Stocks: “The dream hire has already done the exact journey. Joined at the seed stage, stayed six years, and went all the way through to an IPO.” That’s the dream, but these people aren’t easy to find. To recognize the right engineer, here are some traits to consider if you’re looking to kick your startup into high gear.
Traits for Scale
Startups typically attract the type of engineers you’ll need to get to scale. Once you’ve identified someone with a startup background, here’s what to screen for in an interview.
Adaptability
You don’t need someone with heaps of experience. What you need is someone with three or four years under their belt, a solid technical background, and the grit to do whatever the stage demands. That doesn’t just mean clocking long hours – it’s adapting when a six-month test campaign fails and the roadmap has to be rebuilt overnight.
We’ve seen a company relocate its entire business from Austin to Los Angeles with barely any warning. The engineers who make it through that kind of stage are the ones willing to go the distance, sometimes literally.
Team-first thinking
The strongest candidates don’t only talk about what they’ll personally deliver. They talk about what the whole team needs to prove to get to the next round. It’s less about what one engineer brings to the table, and more about how the team gets there together.
Passion
The common mistake founders make is choosing the candidate with the most experience and the strongest technical qualifications over the one who genuinely wants to do the work. A technically brilliant hire who isn’t willing to commit to the work at a demanding stage will not work. Someone earlier in their career who genuinely loves the tech, and wants to get stuck in, is usually a solid bet.
Matching the Engineer to the Stage
Working Against the Funding Clock
There’s no generic “startup engineer” template. Two companies at the exact same headcount might need completely different technical skills. The skills you need depend on how much money you have, and the product you’re building. A software company, a hardware company, and a consultancy tend to need different people at the same stage, and within hardware, the specific kind you’re building narrows it down even more. A propulsion engineer who’s spent years on liquid engines isn’t automatically the right fit for a team building an all-electric smallsat bus.
Once you’ve narrowed down the skills you need, don’t forget to factor in business literacy. The strongest early hires understand the funding clock they’re working against, not just the technical task in front of them. Someone who’s only worked inside a large defense program or a prime moves at a different pace than your company can afford. Your seed round doesn’t buy you that kind of time. Those programs are built around multi-year delivery windows, backed by funding that’s already secured. The pace that made someone excellent there can be exactly what stalls you here.
Every month that passes without proof the technology works is a month closer to running out of money. That’s why someone who treats the work as a pure engineering problem, disconnected from that clock, is not the best fit.
The generalist trap
That’s also why you don’t want a pure generalist at this stage. You may have heard that a startup needs someone who wears many hats, and that’s true. But a generalist who oversees a program without doing any of the engineering themselves is only valuable once you have thirty engineers to manage.
A strong early hire is still doing the technical work themselves, and brings a degree of specialisation to the role, with the ability to adapt and learn new skills. Because at this stage, there’s no team yet to delegate to. Building something that’s never been done before takes one kind of engineer. Building a better version of something the industry relies on takes another.
The work
The role you’re hiring for today won’t be the same role in two or three years, and the right hire knows that. The roles that exist need building, not managing, and someone who’s drifted into oversight won’t have the hands-on ability this stage demands.
None of these things shows up on a resume. If your first ten engineers can’t deliver against the roadmap in time to raise the next round, the next fifty hires get a lot harder to justify.