You’ve nailed the idea. You’ve developed your vision. How do you bring it to life? Bring in the engineers! It’s likely that your founding team has experience in software engineering, but as you begin to scale, you’ll need dedicated, advanced, full-time engineers. These are typically the first hires you make as an early-stage startup, meaning that they’re mission critical for shipping product and they’ll also set the tone for the type of company culture you’ll build.
TLDR:
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AI and ML engineering roles grew 88% in new hires in 2025, making them your most competitive startup searches.
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Source your founding engineer from your personal network first; strangers are hard to convince at the pre-funding stage.
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Favor engineers with design sensibility so you can iterate on UI without waiting for a dedicated designer.
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Have finalists build on your actual codebase for a day; credentials alone won’t surface culture or execution gaps.
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Assess collaboration, execution under ambiguity, technical depth, and measurable past impact across your interview loop.
How Do We Define Engineers and Engineering Departments?
Frontend Engineer
- Owns the user interface: layouts, visual presentation, and responsiveness across devices and browsers. Handles cross-browser compatibility and UI bug fixes.
Backend Engineer
- Builds and maintains the server-side logic, data systems, and APIs that power the application. Responsible for scalability, performance, and integrations with external services.
Fullstack Engineer
- Works across both frontend and backend, with the range to build a fully functional web application end to end.
Software Engineer in Test (QA Engineer)
- Writes automated tests and validation tooling to confirm that products and processes behave as expected before and after release.
Site Reliability Engineer
- Keeps production systems reliable by building monitoring and automation tooling, responding to incidents, and taking on-call responsibilities.
DevOps Engineer
- DevOps engineers own the infrastructure layer: CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, servers, and databases that keep applications running.
Security Engineer
- Tests systems for vulnerabilities and builds defenses against them, often working as an ethical hacker who attempts to breach the application before bad actors can.
Machine Learning (ML) Engineer
- Builds and deploys AI and predictive systems, including LLM integration and agentic tooling. Ravio’s 2026 tech hiring trends report found AI and ML new hires grew 88% in 2025, making this one of the most competitive searches at startups today.
Mobile Engineer
- Builds mobile applications, typically for Android, iOS, or both.
Engineering Hiring in 2026: What’s Changed
A few data points worth knowing before you begin your search:
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Startup hiring is up. Startups posted 57,212 software engineering jobs in the last 12 months, up 39% year-over-year, per startup.jobs hiring trends data.
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AI engineering demand is outpacing general software hiring. AI job openings grew 60% in the past year vs. 7% for general software engineering, per The Pragmatic Engineer’s 2026 market analysis. ML and AI engineers are among the most competitive hires you’ll make.
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Senior demand is strong; mid-level hiring is more selective. Demand is concentrated at the senior and staff level across SaaS, cloud, and AI-native companies, per Recruits Lab’s 2026 Software Engineering Hiring Report.
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AI labs are pulling talent from Big Tech. Candidates are choosing Anthropic and OpenAI over traditional Big Tech employers, compressing the senior talent pool for startups.
Hiring Your Founding Engineer
Your founding engineer is often the hardest hire you’ll make. At the pre-funding or pre-product stage, lean on your internal network for three reasons:
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Convincing a stranger to believe in your vision and work ethic is hard
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This person may become your CTO; you want someone you already know you work well with
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Early hires take on real risk, sometimes a pay cut; they need to trust you as a person, not the pitch alone
Founders who can’t get anyone in their network to join are often a signal to outside candidates. Building that core trust layer early matters.
1. Determine what the ideal profile of your founding engineer would look like
Your founding engineer will build your product and team from scratch. Answer these questions before you start sourcing:
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Will they need expertise in a specific tech stack? Deep knowledge of a particular platform or language is typically more valuable than a generalist profile at this stage.
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Could this person become your CTO? If so, look for prior management experience and a strong hiring network. Arum, co-founder and CEO of Coffee Meets Bagel, nurtured the relationship with her founding engineer over coffee chats for six months before making the hire. “What’s important for anyone I bring on to the team is that we really know each other well. They have to be smart and good at what they do, and they also have to be mature. You just cannot force that.”
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Do you want to offer a contract-to-hire option? It adds flexibility and limits friction if the fit isn’t right, even with a friend or former colleague. Early startups move fast and stress-test relationships quickly.
2. Lean on your investors, your network and developer meetups to find the right candidate
If your network doesn’t reach engineers directly, these channels tend to work:
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Developer meetups. Arum (co-founder of Coffee Meets Bagel) met her founding engineer at a meetup. Someone showing up to invest in their craft is a good early signal.
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Your investors. They have a direct interest in your success and know who is at the top of their career. Ask for a warm introduction.
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Your network. Even if you don’t know engineers personally, someone you know does. A referral from a trusted contact gets top candidates to take the call.
These channels can take several weeks to produce qualified candidates. When the role is senior, the technical bar is high, or the team has no bandwidth to run outreach, that’s when a fractional recruiting agency adds sourcing capacity on top of your existing pipeline without adding headcount.
3. Hire engineers with design experience
Aaron Epstein, partner at Y Combinator, recommends hiring engineers who also have design experience. Look for engineers with a good eye, even if they’ve never held a design title. Engineers who can iterate across code and UI move faster, and they build a foundation a future designer won’t need to undo.
4. Have them work on an actual part of your code base
If a candidate clears initial screens, invite them to work on the actual codebase for a day. Dover co-founder Anvisha Pai, who has been a founding engineer herself, calls this the best assessment of real-world competency.
“At Dover, we were introduced to some highly credentialed people who didn’t end up being a fit and it came out pretty clearly in this process in a way that wouldn’t have come up in a whiteboard interview.” - Anvisha Pai, Cofounder and Head of Product
When hiring Dover’s founding engineer, Anvisha gave him three potential features and told him to pick one to build. Within three days, he had built all of them. The process gave the team clear conviction: the decision to hire John, now Dover’s CTO, was unanimous.
Key Skills
Along with technical coding knowledge, the following skill categories are key to an engineer’s success. You’ll want to assess these skills in the second remote screen, as well as throughout the onsite and final interview process.
| Skill | Sample question | Strong signal |
|---|---|---|
| Collaboration | Tell me about a time you disagreed with an engineer and how you resolved it. | Humility, self-awareness, credit given to teammates; ends with what they learned |
| Execution | Walk me through a project where the requirements or end goals weren’t well-defined. | Proactive stakeholder communication, autonomous delivery, clear articulation of roadblocks and how they solved them |
| Technical sense | How do you quality-check and debug your code? What is your process? | Names specific tools and procedures; mentions reliability, stability, integration testing, and willingness to ask for help |
| Impact | What’s the most impactful product you shipped, and what made it so important? | Articulates concrete metrics, product adoption, or revenue outcomes; shows ownership |
Collaboration
An engineer will have to function as a mediator between product, design and different engineering departments. They will need to be good at delegating, and they’ll also need to effectively compromise and argue for various improvements in the product with various stakeholders. They’ll also need to be able to debug, help QA other engineers’ projects, and provide assistance to unblock team members if need be.
Execution
Working at a startup or on a small team often means that engineers will receive projects without crystal clear direction.
It’s not enough to have an engineer who is a talented coder. You need someone who is capable of making decisions that are in the best interest of your company’s overall strategy/vision, defining deadlines and goals, as well as success metrics. Execution requires other important qualities like time-management, effective communication, and excellent people management skills.
Technical Sense
To put it simply, great engineers should love to code. Especially as an early-stage company, technical knowledge is key in getting over the tough hurdles of building infrastructure from the ground-up, iterating on coding projects and design, and debugging platform issues.
Impact
Measuring impact in previous roles is your best signal when determining the success of an engineering hire. We define some things to look out for below, but generally it’s important that they’re able to express what they’ve built in the past, and how they solved bugs, collaborated with the team, and improved on a product or feature over time.
How Dover Fits Into Your Engineering Hiring
Engineering hiring is expensive whichever route you take. Running the search yourself pulls 15-25 hours of founder time per week. A traditional agency charges 15-25% of first-year salary ($18,000-$30,000 on a $120,000 hire), and a full-time recruiter costs $85,000-$170,000 per year loaded, a commitment that rarely makes sense before you’re running 15-20 open roles.
Dover is the layer fractional recruiting agencies are built on: a free ATS paired with a marketplace of vetted fractional recruiters, each with verified reviews, working as dedicated partners on your open role. Recruiters set their own rates, which have averaged $75-$125/hour, and engineering searches have averaged $2,000-$7,000 per hire, with no retainer, no long-term contract, and an $800 refundable deposit to get started. Over 100 YC-backed startups have used Dover across engineering, product, and go-to-market roles.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best hiring tools for YC-backed startups?
The core stack for most YC-backed startups is a free ATS for pipeline management, Wellfound and LinkedIn for job distribution, and a sourcing tool for passive outreach. For hard-to-fill roles, many also bring in fractional recruiting support. Dover was built for this context: a free ATS paired with on-demand fractional recruiters, averaging $2,000 to $7,000 per hire with no retainer.
What free recruiting software works for bootstrapped startups?
Look for a free ATS that covers job posting, applicant tracking, and scheduling without per-seat fees. Dover’s free ATS fits: unlimited jobs and users, a no-code careers page, one-click distribution to 100+ job boards, and built-in referral tracking. AI applicant scoring and AI note taking sit on the $199/month Premium ATS plan rather than the free tier. A spreadsheet works for one hire; once you have two or three open roles, a dedicated tool saves real time.
Do I need a recruiter if I’m already using an ATS?
An ATS manages your pipeline but doesn’t source candidates for you. Self-serve works well when inbound is strong and the role isn’t highly specialized. When you’re filling a senior or technical role, your network has dried up, or the team has no bandwidth for outreach, a fractional recruiting agency adds sourcing and qualification capacity on top of your existing pipeline without replacing it.
Final Thoughts on Hiring Engineers for Your Startup
Getting your first few full-time engineering hires right matters more than moving fast. The role definition, sourcing channel, interview loop, and final offer all compound: a strong founding engineer shapes the team and codebase you build from. For teams without dedicated recruiting support, Dover offers one concrete path: a free ATS to manage the pipeline with access to a vetted fractional recruiting agency network when the search calls for it, averaging $2,000-$7,000 per hire. The right approach depends on your stage, your network, and how much bandwidth you have to run the search yourself.
