Hiring & Team Building

What to Look for in Your First Engineering Hire After Funding

You have raised money. Now you need to build the product. Getting your first engineering hire right is the single highest-leverage decision you will make.

Mike Tempest • 10 min read • 19 March 2026

You have closed your seed round or Series A. The investors are excited. The roadmap is ambitious. And now you need an engineer to actually build the thing.

If you are a non-technical founder, this hire is terrifying. You cannot evaluate code quality. You do not know what "good" looks like in an engineering candidate. And you are about to hand someone significant equity to make decisions you cannot fully assess.

Having built engineering teams from zero multiple times, I can tell you this: the mistakes founders make at this stage are remarkably consistent. They are also avoidable. Here is what to look for, what to avoid, and how to structure the hire so it works.

Timing: When to Pull the Trigger

Most founders hire too late or too early. Too late means you have been relying on an agency or no-code tool for months, building up technical debt before you even have a team. Too early means you are hiring before you have enough clarity on what to build, which wastes runway on engineering time spent going in circles.

The right time to hire your first engineer is when you have:

Validated demand through customer conversations, a waitlist, or a prototype that people are actually using
At least 12 months of runway so you are not hiring under financial pressure that forces bad compromises
A clear first milestone for the product, even if the longer-term roadmap is fuzzy
Enough work to keep a full-time engineer busy for at least 6 months

A common mistake

Founders often try to "de-risk" by hiring a contractor first and converting them later. This can work, but only if you treat it as a deliberate strategy with a clear conversion timeline. If you leave it open-ended, good engineers will take permanent roles elsewhere.

What Role to Hire First: Senior Full-Stack, Not a Specialist

Your first engineer needs to do everything. Frontend, backend, infrastructure, deployment, database design, third-party integrations. They will not be brilliant at all of it, but they need to be competent across the stack.

This is not the time for a React specialist or a machine learning engineer. It is the time for a senior full-stack engineer with 6 or more years of experience who has shipped production software at small companies. Later, as you scale, the question of whether you need a CTO or a VP of Engineering becomes relevant — but right now, you need someone who can build.

What you want

Has been employee 1 to 10 at a startup before
Can set up CI/CD, monitoring, and deployment from scratch
Makes pragmatic trade-offs between speed and quality
Communicates clearly with non-technical people
Pushes back on bad ideas, including yours

What you do not want

Only worked at large companies with mature infrastructure
Wants to spend weeks on architecture before writing code
Deep specialist in one area but cannot work across the stack
Says yes to everything without raising concerns
Wants the CTO title before there is a team to lead

How to Assess Technical Ability When You Are Not Technical

This is the question every non-technical founder dreads. You cannot read their code. You cannot evaluate their system design. But you can still run an effective hiring process.

1. Get external technical help for the interview

Pay a senior engineer, a fractional CTO, or a trusted technical advisor to run a technical interview. This typically costs £200 to £500 per candidate and is the single best investment you can make in this process. Do not skip this.

2. Use a paid take-home exercise

Give candidates a small, realistic problem related to your product. Pay them for their time (£200 to £400 for 3 to 4 hours of work). This filters out candidates who cannot ship, and paying for their time signals that you respect engineers. Ask your technical interviewer to review the submissions.

3. Ask questions you can evaluate

You may not be able to assess code, but you can assess communication, judgement, and approach. Questions that work well for non-technical interviewers:

"Walk me through how you would build [your product's core feature]. What would you build first, and what would you leave for later?"
"Tell me about a time you disagreed with a product decision. What happened?"
"What would you want to know about our users before you started building?"
"How would you explain a technical trade-off to me so I could make an informed business decision?"

4. Check references properly

Do not just ask "was this person good?" Ask specific questions: "Would you hire them again as your first engineer at an early-stage startup?" and "What did they struggle with?" The second question is more revealing than the first.

Red Flags in Engineering Candidates

These patterns should make you pause, regardless of how impressive the CV looks. For a deeper dive, see our full guide on red flags when hiring your first engineer.

They cannot explain things simply

If a candidate cannot explain their previous work in terms you understand, they will not be able to communicate trade-offs when it matters. Technical jargon in an interview is a warning sign, not a sign of expertise.

They have never shipped anything end to end

Working on features within a large team is different from owning a product from database to deployment. Your first hire needs the latter experience.

They are more excited about the technology than the problem

You want someone who asks about your customers and business model, not someone who immediately wants to discuss which framework to use. Technology is a means, not an end.

They want to rewrite everything

If you have existing code (from a prototype, agency, or no-code tool) and the candidate's first instinct is to throw it all away, be cautious. Good engineers assess what exists, keep what works, and improve incrementally.

They have no questions for you

A senior engineer joining a startup should have dozens of questions about the business, the product, the users, and the runway. No questions means they are not thinking critically about whether this is the right opportunity.

Equity and Compensation: Getting the Package Right

Underpaying your first engineer is a false economy. You are asking someone to take a significant career risk, work without the support structures of a larger company, and make foundational decisions that affect your product for years. The compensation needs to reflect that.

UK Market Rates (2026)

Base salary (senior full-stack) £75,000 to £110,000

Equity (seed stage, first engineer) 0.5% to 2.0%

Vesting schedule 4 years, 1-year cliff

EMI options (tax-efficient) Strongly recommended

A common approach is to offer slightly below-market salary (£70,000 to £85,000) with above-market equity (1% to 2%). This only works if the candidate genuinely believes in the opportunity. If you are offering below-market on both salary and equity, you will only attract candidates who cannot get better offers elsewhere.

Set up an EMI share option scheme before you make the offer. It is more tax-efficient for the employee and signals that you have your corporate governance in order.

Culture Fit vs Technical Skill

"Culture fit" has become a loaded term, often used to justify hiring people who look and think like the founder. That is not what I mean here.

What matters is working style alignment. Your first engineer will spend more time with you than almost anyone else in the company. You need to be able to have honest, direct conversations about priorities, trade-offs, and disagreements.

What to assess

Communication style: Do they proactively share updates, or do you have to chase them? At a startup, you cannot afford information silos.
Comfort with ambiguity: Can they make progress when requirements are unclear? Startups do not have detailed specifications.
Ownership mentality: Do they see problems and fix them, or do they wait to be told?
Honesty about timelines: Will they tell you something will take 4 weeks when it will take 4 weeks, or will they say 2 and miss the deadline?

The balance:

If you have two candidates and one is technically stronger but a poor communicator, hire the slightly less technical one who communicates well. You can close a skills gap with training. You cannot easily fix a communication problem.

The Contractor-to-Hire Pipeline

Many founders use contractors as a trial period before making a permanent hire. This can be a smart approach, but only if you structure it deliberately.

Set a clear timeline

Agree upfront that the contract is a 2 to 3 month trial with the intention of converting to permanent. Open-ended contracts lead to drift.

Treat them like a team member, not a vendor

Include them in planning, share context, give them access to customers. You are evaluating whether they can be your first engineer, not whether they can deliver a project to spec.

Evaluate beyond code quality

Do they ask good questions? Do they challenge your assumptions? Do they communicate proactively? These matter more than clean code at this stage.

Make the offer competitive

Contractor day rates (£400 to £600 for senior engineers) are higher than the permanent salary equivalent. When converting, the package needs to include meaningful equity to bridge the gap. Do not assume they will take a pay cut just because the role is permanent.

One warning: do not use the contractor model as an excuse to avoid commitment. Good engineers know when they are being kept at arm's length, and the best ones will not wait around.

Key Takeaways

Hire a senior full-stack engineer, not a specialist or a junior. This person sets the technical foundation for everything that follows.
Get external technical help for the interview process. It is the highest-ROI spend in your hiring budget.
Pay market rate. Below-market salary with below-market equity attracts below-market candidates.
Prioritise communication and ownership mentality over raw technical ability.
The contractor-to-hire pipeline works, but only with a clear timeline and genuine intent to convert.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Should my first engineering hire be a CTO or a senior engineer?

A senior engineer. At seed stage, you need someone who writes code every day, not someone who spends half their time in strategy meetings. You can layer in technical leadership later, either by promoting this person or bringing in a <a href="/what-is-fractional-cto" class="text-accent-red underline hover:text-red-700">fractional CTO</a>. Hiring a CTO title too early often means overpaying for seniority you do not yet need. As you scale, you may need to consider the distinction between leadership roles: see our guide on <a href="/blog/cto-vs-vp-engineering" class="text-accent-red underline hover:text-red-700">CTO vs VP of Engineering</a>.

How much equity should I offer my first engineer?

In the UK (2026), 0.5% to 2% is typical for a first engineering hire at seed stage, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff. Below 0.5%, you are not competitive for senior talent. Above 2%, you may be giving away too much too early. The exact number depends on salary level, stage, and how much risk the candidate is taking.

Can I hire a junior developer to save money?

No. Your first engineer makes architectural decisions that last for years. A junior developer does not have the experience to make those decisions well, and you do not have the technical knowledge to guide them. You will end up paying twice: once for the junior, and again to fix or rewrite what they built.

Should I use a recruitment agency for my first engineering hire?

Only if you have exhausted your network first. Agencies charge 15% to 25% of first-year salary, which at £90,000 means £13,500 to £22,500. That is real money at seed stage. Try founder networks, AngelList, LinkedIn outreach, and tech meetups first. If you do use an agency, choose one that specialises in startup hiring.

How do I know if a contractor is worth converting to a full-time hire?

Look at three things: do they challenge your assumptions (not just build what you ask for), do they communicate proactively about trade-offs and timelines, and does the quality of their work hold up under pressure? If yes to all three, make the offer. If they only execute without pushing back, they are a good contractor but probably not the right first hire.

Mike Tempest

Fractional CTO

Mike led engineering at RefME (scaled 0 to 2M users, acquired by Chegg) and was CTO at Risika (turned loss-making fintech profitable in 18 months). He now works as a Fractional CTO helping UK startups build technical leadership without the full-time cost.

Learn more about Mike