How to Run Your First
Engineering Hiring Process
Engineering hiring is where most non-technical founders get stuck — or get taken. They either over-rely on gut feel and land someone who interviews brilliantly but ships slowly, or they build a process so heavy it drives good candidates away. Here’s how to get it right the first time.
- What you’re actually evaluating — and what you’re not
- Where to find strong engineers at early stage
- The screening process that filters fast without wasting candidates’ time
- The technical assessment that isn’t a whiteboard nightmare
- What to look for beyond technical skill
- How to close an engineering candidate
- The onboarding that retains your first engineers
What You’re Actually Evaluating
For an early-stage engineering hire, you’re evaluating three things in roughly this order of importance: can they ship real working code in your stack, are they comfortable with ambiguity and changing requirements, and will they thrive in a small team where nobody else will check their work for a long time.
What you are not primarily evaluating: whether they can solve abstract algorithmic puzzles under time pressure, whether they can recite design patterns from memory, or whether they interviewed well at a FAANG company. The skills that make someone a great Big Tech engineer (careful process, working within well-defined systems, specialisation) are different from the skills that make someone a great early-stage startup engineer (generalisation, speed, comfort with imperfect information).
The most expensive engineering mis-hire at early stage: a very senior engineer from a large company who is used to having a full team, a defined scope, and established systems. They arrive, find none of those things, and either create unnecessary process or become frustrated and leave within 6 months. Seek engineers who’ve built at early stage before — or who actively want to.
Where to Find Strong Engineers
Your existing network first: engineers hired through a warm referral from someone who knows the work environment are the most likely to be a strong fit. Ask every engineer you know — and every advisor, investor, and founder peer — before posting anywhere publicly.
GitHub and open source: find engineers who are actively contributing to projects in your tech stack. Someone who has built something publicly and maintained it over time is demonstrating shipping ability in a way no resume can. A genuine, specific message about their work (“I saw your contribution to X and wanted to reach out”) has high response rates.
Niche communities: Slack communities, Discord servers, and subreddits for your specific tech stack often have job channels or members who are actively looking. A specific post (“we’re building X in Y stack, here’s the actual problem you’d be solving on day 1”) performs better than a generic “we’re hiring” post.
Hired, AngelList Talent, and Wellfound: for volume at the top of the funnel. Useful for generating candidate flow when the network isn’t producing enough. Filter aggressively — the signal-to-noise ratio is lower than referrals.
The Screening Process That Filters Fast
A 4-step process that respects candidates’ time and yours: async application review (CV + portfolio + 3 specific questions), a 30-minute culture and fit call with the founder, a take-home technical assessment (see below), and a final 60-minute technical interview with the team. Total candidate time: roughly 4 hours. Total your time for a full pipeline: manageable. Don’t add steps unless you have a clear problem the step is solving.
The 3 application questions that pre-qualify: “Describe a technical problem you solved recently that you’re proud of — what was the constraint and how did you approach it?” “What does your ideal working environment look like at this stage of company?” “What’s something in our stack or product that caught your attention?” Candidates who give specific, thoughtful answers to all three are worth a phone screen. Candidates who give generic answers are usually not.
The Technical Assessment That Isn’t a Nightmare
The take-home assessment that works at early stage: a small, realistic task that takes 2–4 hours and is as close to the actual work as possible. Not a puzzle — a problem. For a backend engineer: add a feature to a small existing codebase. For a frontend engineer: build a component from a spec. For a full-stack generalist: fix a bug and add a small feature, with the time log included.
Pay candidates for the assessment time — $100–200 at the take-home stage signals that you value their time and attracts engineers who are serious and experienced. It also significantly improves completion rates and the quality of what you receive. This cost is trivial relative to the cost of a mis-hire.
What to evaluate in the submission: does it work? Is the code readable by someone other than the author? Did they handle edge cases, or only the happy path? Did they ask a clarifying question before starting (good signal) or make assumptions (acceptable, but note what they assumed)? Did they document what they did and why?
What to Look for Beyond Technical Skill
Communication: can they explain a technical decision in plain language to a non-engineer? At early stage, every engineer will regularly interact with non-technical stakeholders — founders, customers, investors. The engineer who can only communicate in code is a bottleneck.
Ownership: do they talk about what they built, or what the team built? Do they describe what went wrong as clearly as what went right? Engineers who own their failures are the ones who learn from them — and who are honest with you when something isn’t going well.
Comfort with ambiguity: ask them to describe a time they had to start building before the requirements were fully clear. The engineers who thrive at early stage are energised by this — it’s freedom, not frustration. The ones who struggle will describe it as a problem to be solved by more process.
How to Close an Engineering Candidate
Strong engineers at seed stage are choosing between stability (a larger company offer) and upside (your offer). The close is about making the upside real: a specific conversation about the equity, what it’s worth today and what it could be worth, the specific technical problems they’ll own, and the kind of team they’ll be part of.
The engineer who joins a startup for the salary is not the engineer you want. The one who joins for the problem, the equity, and the building opportunity — that’s who you’re selling. Use our equity guide to structure the offer and use our offer letter playbook to write the close.
“Design a take-home technical assessment for a [role — e.g. full-stack engineer, backend engineer] at my startup. Our stack: [list]. The real work they’d be doing in the first 90 days: [describe]. The assessment should: take 2–4 hours maximum, involve realistic work not a puzzle, be completable without any knowledge of our specific codebase, and produce output that lets me evaluate code quality, problem-solving approach, and communication. Include: the task description as I’d send it to the candidate, the rubric I’ll use to score it (4–5 criteria), and the 3 follow-up questions I should ask in the debrief call. Make it something a strong candidate would find genuinely interesting, not tedious.”
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