You’ve raised, and now you can finally hire the engineers you’ve been promising yourself. But a blank headcount plan is deceptively hard.
Who comes first – and who can wait a couple of quarters without slowing everything down?
The order you hire in shapes the team you end up with. Get the first few right and each one makes the next easier.
Get them wrong and you spend the next year correcting a course you didn’t have time for.
Hire for the problem in front of you
Forget the org chart you sketched for the Series B. Right now you have a specific product to ship and a specific set of gaps. Hire against those. If the thing standing between you and the roadmap is backend throughput, hire the backend engineer who’s solved that before – not the generalist who looks good on paper for a team you don’t have yet. The early hires should map to real problems, not to a future you’re guessing at.
Your first hire sets the standard for the next ten
Early engineers do more than write code. They set the bar, the conventions and the tone that everyone after them inherits. Your first two or three hires become your de facto interviewers, mentors and culture carriers whether you plan it or not. Hire people you’d be happy to clone, because in a sense you’re about to.
Generalists early, specialists as the work sharpens
In the first handful of hires, range beats depth. You want engineers who can move across the stack, pick up whatever’s on fire, and thrive when the requirements change on a Tuesday. The deep specialists – the platform lead, the machine learning engineer, the security hire – come into their own once the work is defined enough to need them. Hiring a narrow specialist too early often means paying for expertise you can’t yet point at a problem.
Be honest about what you can’t yet support
A brilliant senior hire dropped into a company with no process, no onboarding and no peers can still fail – and it’ll look like their fault when it isn’t. Before you hire someone, ask whether you can actually set them up to succeed. Sometimes the answer is to hire slightly differently, or to fix the support first. A great engineer in a vacuum is a flight risk.
The manager question, usually later than you think
Founders often reach for an engineering manager early, hoping to hand off the people side. But managing three engineers is a part-time job, and a manager with no one to manage ends up either coding full-time or inventing process nobody needs. Hold off until the team is big enough that leadership is a real job. Until then, a strong senior individual contributor who mentors well gets you most of the way.
Get help where the market is thin
Some of these roles you’ll fill through your own network. Others – the ones where the talent is scarce and every funded startup is chasing the same names – are where a specialist partner pays for itself. If you want a steer on sequencing and sourcing, that’s exactly what we do: engineering recruitment for VC-backed tech companies.
So who comes first?
The person who unblocks the problem in front of you, sets a standard you’d want to repeat, and can flex as the work changes. Build momentum, not headcount, and the plan on the board deck starts to look a lot more achievable.
Choosing the right recruitment agency is about fit, expertise, and trust.
By asking the right questions and digging into their processes, you can find a partner who not only fills roles – but helps you build a Product & Engineering team that fuels long-term SaaS growth.
Invest in a Product & Engineering Recruitment agency and accelerate your path to success.
Reach out to a member of the team here, or see more about how we can support your growth here.
