Founding engineers play a critical role in the success of startups and are often one of their first hires. Their technical expertise, problem-solving skills and leadership are instrumental in driving growth for a startup in its early stages.
As a hiring partner of many startups who need founding engineers, we’re sharing six key traits that make a founding engineer candidate stand out and what to look for when hiring a founding engineer.
Successful founding engineers possess a deep understanding of relevant technologies and how to build products in their specific field. Examples of these fields could be semiconductors, hearing technology, streaming technology, robotics, social networks, and more.
Having technical expertise in place is often necessary so founding engineers can hit the ground running to scale and develop their company further. Founding engineers often excel in developing scalable and efficient code architecture, laying a robust foundation for a startup's product or software solution.
Founding engineers often have 10 or more years of experience in their industries, holding progressive roles or positions at these companies.
Check out the responsibilities and backgrounds that go into a founding engineer job description here.
One of the defining traits of successful founding engineers is their exceptional problem-solving ability. They quickly identify and tackle complex technical challenges using innovative approaches. For example, founding engineers may be tasked with a difficult integration that needs to happen for a company to sign on new clients. Or perhaps they’ll need to figure out a way to scale infrastructure with high standards for privacy and security.
If you’re hiring a founding engineer, it’s likely you already have a sense of the greatest technical problems your business faces. While you don’t need to share everything your company is working on (we know early stage startups like to keep some things confidential!), don’t hold back too much on asking about specific problems you’re facing. It’s best to know right away if they’d thrive on solving that particular challenge, or if it’s not the right role for them.
Successful founding engineers not only excel technically but also have strong leadership and teamwork abilities. They effectively lead, motivate, and inspire their development teams toward achieving the organization's goals.
However, since a founding engineer is often the first hires of a startup – they may not have a team yet. Their leadership skills may take a different form, like leading their CEO or CTO to adopt a new tech stack or invest in a new feature through persuasion. Or perhaps their leadership skills come into play when presenting confidently to the board or speaking about their progress to date.
Regardless of whether they have a team, many of the best founding engineers are strategic thinkers who can artfully present their ideas and lead others to support their vision – which are hallmarks of leadership.
Successful founding engineers embrace challenges and are willing to pivot when necessary. They exhibit resilience in the face of setbacks, using failures as learning opportunities to improve their skills and move forward.
If you’re interviewing founding engineers, ask them about their greatest setbacks in the workplace and how they overcame them. It’s likely that they’ll have stories about some massive setbacks – times when products or features were delayed by months, or APIs didn’t work how they were supposed to, or a partnership fell through. But the most successful candidates will let you know how they responded and what they did next to overcome these obstacles.
Passion and drive are key qualities that set successful founding engineers apart. They genuinely love what they do and go above and beyond to achieve success (this can also be a matter of personal pride for many founding engineers!).
However, it’s important to note that founding engineers are often compensated well. Salaries are often in the $150-250K range depending on the seniority of the candidate, their background, and the stage of the company – not including equity. Many founding engineer candidates are intrigued by founding engineer roles because of equity, and the opportunity to have a true stake in a business.
Founding engineer equity is important to many of these candidates, and something startup founders should discuss before interviews start.
This may be one of the most important traits of all! While it’s important that founding engineers be adaptable, resilient, and essentially act entrepreneurial in their day to day work – they still need to match the vision of the CEO or founders. Founding engineers who want to take the product in a different direction, or don’t share the same plan as other members of the leadership team are usually not be the best fit for the company.
If you’re interviewing founding engineers, ask them careful questions about your vision and mission and if this aligns with what they’re looking for as well. Are they interested in building a product with features you’re not sold on? Are they excited about doing a lot of work themselves without the support of a team? Can they put themselves in the shoes of your end customers or clients, and are they empathetic to their problems?
Asking questions similar to these will help you determine if they’re a good fit for your organization.
Interested in learning more about hiring founding engineers? Get connected to the team at Recruiting from Scratch on how to start your search.
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