How to Hire Your First Engineer at the Seed Stage

Your first engineering hire is arguably the most important hire you will ever make. They will set the technical direction for your company. They will establish coding standards that persist for years. They will influence every engineer who comes after them. And they will either accelerate your path to product-market fit or slow it to a crawl.

No pressure.

What to Actually Look For

Forget Pedigree, Find Builders

Your first engineer does not need to have worked at Google or have a Stanford degree. What they need is the ability to build things. Fast. End to end. Without hand-holding.

Look for people who have shipped products. Not features within products. Entire products. They should be able to go from a napkin sketch to a deployed application with user authentication, a database, an API, and a reasonable frontend. If they have only ever worked on one layer of the stack at a big company, they are not ready for this role.

The Five Essential Traits

Full-stack capability. They need to be comfortable across the entire stack because there is no one else to hand things off to. This does not mean they need to be an expert in everything, but they need to be functional everywhere.

Speed over perfection. At the seed stage, moving fast matters more than building perfectly. You need someone who can ship an MVP in two weeks, not someone who spends two weeks choosing a framework.

Product thinking. The best first engineers think like product people. They ask why before how. They push back on features that do not matter. They suggest simpler solutions that achieve the same goal.

Comfort with ambiguity. The requirements will change. The product will pivot. The database schema will be rewritten. Your first engineer needs to be excited by this, not terrified.

Communication. They will be the entire engineering team. They need to communicate progress, blockers, and tradeoffs clearly to non-technical founders, investors, and customers.

Where to Find Them

Your Network First

The best first engineering hires come through warm connections. Ask everyone you know. Post on your personal social media. Reach out to former colleagues. The candidate you want is probably employed and not actively looking, so they need to hear about your opportunity from someone they trust.

Communities and Platforms

YC Work at a Startup is excellent if you are a YC company. Hacker News Who Is Hiring threads attract strong candidates. Open source communities in your domain are goldmines. If you are building a developer tool, find the people who are already building similar things for fun.

The Interview

Give them a real problem from your product. Not a toy problem. Not a LeetCode question. An actual challenge you are facing right now. Watch how they approach it. Do they ask about users? Do they consider the business context? Do they think about what is good enough versus what is perfect?

The best first engineering hires ask questions like: Who is this for? How many users do we expect? What is the timeline? These questions reveal product thinking and pragmatism.

Compensation

Expect to offer $150-200K in base salary plus 1-2% equity for your first engineering hire. The equity is the real draw. Help them understand the potential value by walking through scenarios at different exit valuations.

If you cannot afford market-rate salary, be honest about it. Some engineers are willing to take a pay cut for the right opportunity, but they need to trust that the equity is real and that the company has a viable path to making it valuable.

The Bottom Line

Your first engineer should be a co-builder, not just an executor. Find someone who is excited about the problem, who can ship independently, and who brings product sense to technical decisions. This hire will shape your company for years to come.