How to Hire a Software Engineer: A Guide for Startups

Whether I’m working with non-technical CEOs or seasoned CTOs, hiring good-fit engineers for a startup is a challenging endeavor.

It’s not that there’s a shortage of good, qualified software engineers. In fact, there are too many to choose from, and knowing whether someone is actually a good fit beyond what they say on paper can be difficult.

In this guide, I’ll give you a crash course on how to source, evaluate, and hire software engineers for an early-stage startup. You don’t need a degree in computer science to know whether you’ve made the right choice for your company.

When to Hire a Software Engineer

Often, software companies are established by a team with a technical co-founder who can shoulder the load at the MVP stage, up to the point where the company gains traction.

At some stage, though, this technical co-founder becomes a bottleneck as product development demands conflict with leadership demands.

When this occurs, many companies need to make a choice: Hire someone full-time or hire a contractor/development agency. In either case, it helps to run through the following questions:

• Is your current technical team a bottleneck and holding you back? By hiring more engineers, could you go faster and meet deadlines and customer demands?
• Do you have some degree of product-market fit, giving a new engineer meaningful work to work on? I get asked this question a lot. The truth is, few people really know how to define product-market fit. I like to think of it as a gut feeling you get based on the following metrics:
  • Revenue: Are people willing to pay for it? Better yet, do they actually pay for it rather than vaguely say they would in the future? There’s nothing that validates a product quite like money from real customers.
  • Adoption: Do people who sign up for the product actually use it? Beyond paying for the product, you need customers to stick around and continue to pay. Keep an eye on your product’s adoption and retention metrics.
  • Churn: Churn happens. You will lose a customer at some point, but if churn is dwarfed by your ability to bring on new customers, you could be on your way to product-market fit.
• Is tech debt (attention on internal issues and bugs) holding you back from taking on new work to add new product features and make your offerings more competitive in the market?

For most startups, the right time to hire a software engineer is usually when you have some recurring revenue (even if not profitable yet), a clear product direction, and specific technical challenges that require dedicated focus rather than quick experiments.

Frontend, Backend, or Fullstack? Which Type of Engineer to Hire

Not all software engineers are alike. As you evaluate your needs, you will need to determine whether you hire a frontend, backend, or full-stack engineer.

If you know your team’s specific capabilities and needs, this question can be simple enough to answer. For a brief primer, frontend engineers work on the user interfaces that your customers interact with (the frontend), backend engineers work on the data management and processing side of your product (the backend), and full-stack developers have experience with both front and backend engineering.

The following guidelines will be helpful in your decision-making and evaluation process:

• Hire a full-stack engineer if: Your current team is small (1-3 people) and prioritizes flexibility over experience in one area. Full-stack engineers can be helpful in taking ownership of features that require both frontend and backend work.
• Hire a frontend engineer if: You need someone laser-focused on user experience, and you have the backend more or less handled at present.
• Hire a backend engineer if: You are dealing with scaling issues, performance problems, or other infrastructure challenges. You may also want to prioritize backend engineers if your product needs heavy data processing or niche API needs.

Junior, Senior, or Staff? What Level of Engineer to Hire

Just as there are different types of engineers, there are also engineers who may have vastly different levels of experience. During your search for talent, you will commonly come across junior, senior, and staff software engineers.

Junior engineers typically have 1-2 years of experience, while senior engineers could have 2-5 years of experience. Staff software engineers are often the most experienced and can provide deep, seasoned technical leadership and direction for your team. Years are not the only thing that matters for startups, though. I often find that the quality of those years matters more than the quantity. The following guidelines may help:

• Hire a junior software engineer if: You have experienced, technical leadership capable of providing mentorship to a junior engineer. Junior engineers are best equipped to learn while completing lower-level tasks before being prompted to contribute to more complex work. It’s worth noting that Junior engineers will need a fair bit of hand-holding as they upskill on the role and gain confidence, allowing them to take a technical lead on features and their work.
• Hire a senior software engineer if: You need someone to hit the ground running immediately. These are a good fit for earlier-stage companies that need talent to make an impact right away. Senior engineers are often capable of working with minimal oversight and are able to make technical decisions and communicate updates while properly estimating their work.
• Hire a staff software engineer if: Your company is well established or needs domain experts to take on particularly difficult technical challenges (for example, custom AI). Staff engineers are the crème de la crème of developers: they are capable of architecting systems, providing extensive mentorship, and undertaking complex development work.

Budgetary Considerations: Software Engineer Salaries and Compensation

You can probably already guess from the cursory glance we provided, but beyond experience, there is a budgetary concern you need to bear in mind when choosing the type of engineer you hire.

That’s why, in addition to a needs assessment, it’s important to consider the amount of budget you’re able to invest in this role.

When hiring a frontend, backend, or full-stack engineer at a startup, budgeting for compensation requires balancing immediate needs with long-term flexibility.

Full-stack engineers are often the best choice early on, especially if your team is small and needs someone who can work across the stack to ship features independently. Their versatility can reduce the need to hire multiple specialists, though they may command slightly higher salaries as they tend to be more experienced.

At early-stage startups where finances may be tighter, equity can become a key lever when bringing on new talent. Offering flexible compensation packages (e.g., salary/bonuses/equity tradeoffs) can help you stay competitive, while factoring in additional costs like tools, cloud infrastructure, and developer resources is essential for a realistic budget. As you grow, you may consider creating compensation bands for different roles and levels of experience.

Pave, a compensation benchmarking tool, suggests software engineers have an equity range of .33-1.32%, though this depends on timing and the startup’s size and financial situation.

Remember: You’re not just hiring an engineer. You’re hiring someone to play a key role in your company’s growth and its future. This means considering candidates based on their technical skill, growth potential, and culture fit. Consider whether you’re optimizing for speed, depth, or versatility, and tailor your budget accordingly.

How to Write a Software Engineer Job Posting

Your job posting plays a key role in determining the type of candidates you attract and bring into your hiring funnel. Bland or generic job postings may appeal to a broader audience, but they won’t necessarily get the attention of the sort of talent your team needs.

A good job posting begins with a job description that covers the core responsibilities and duties of the role. Start by describing the role, tasks, and troubleshooting scenarios the eventual hire will work on, and the desired skills.

When writing a job posting, I like to start with the following three things:

• Assess the needs of my team
• Define the ideal candidate profile I want to hire
• Note the responsibilities and roles of the job

And from there, the basic job posting template I use includes the following:

• A company description: Go beyond the basics and use clear, descriptive language to give your prospective candidates a taste of what your company culture is like.
• Summarize the role: Make sure to include a brief description of the role, key responsibilities, and experiences you are looking for, as well as the tech stack that your team uses and the product category that the software engineer will work in. Make sure to define success for the role, too, and the team structure.
• Skills: Specify what technical and soft skills your organization needs. This can be dictated by specific team needs and organizational contexts. For software engineers, you typically want a skill base that includes some of the following:
  • Problem-solving
  • Proficiency in your programming languages and tech stack
  • Code quality and maintainability
  • Systems thinking
  • Adaptability
  • Collaboration and communication
  • A user-centered mindset.
• Benefits and location: Finally, include where the job is (if it’s not remote), expectations around being in the office, and benefits that come with the job.
• Compensation: I’m an advocate for being upfront about compensation. Pay will depend on location and experience, though some ballpark figures from Payscale are:
  • Junior Software Engineers typically make $93,000 - $117,000/year
  • Senior Software Engineers typically make $113,000 - $140,000/year
  • Staff Software Engineers typically make $156,000 - $198,000/year

A note on these ranges: they’re from an employer-reported database (Payscale) of actual salaries at companies in the tech sector with less than 100 employees across the United States (so, not exclusively markets like San Francisco or New York City). It’s worth noting that there are software engineers at each level who make more or less than the benchmark numbers, depending on each company’s compensation philosophy and taking into account total compensation (e.g., bonuses, equity, benefits, etc.).

As we said earlier, you will need to factor in equity and bonus structures as well. Check out my guide for writing effective job postings for an in-depth walkthrough of this.

The Hiring Process for Hiring a Software Engineer: What to Expect

Interviewing is a key step in any hiring process, but many companies aren’t using their interviews strategically.

This especially goes for software engineer interviews, where you can gauge whether a candidate is truly the right fit for your company. When interviewing engineers, I recommend involving multiple team members in the process so you get diverse, informed perspectives on each candidate.

Whenever you interview a candidate, I find it’s helpful to bear the following in mind:

• Develop a process and stick with it. Don’t add/remove steps as you go, or you’ll end up frustrating candidates.
• Define a clear purpose for each step. Don’t do something “just because.” Every step you take should have a clear purpose that allows you to effectively evaluate each candidate. If you can’t clearly say why you’re doing something, cut it.
• And don’t cut corners! Hiring is one of the most important tasks for any fast-growing company, so don’t skip important steps for the sake of speed.

At a high level, the typical engineering interview process looks like this:

• A recruiter screen: As with any other hire, make sure the candidate meets the minimum requirements for the role and is likely to be a fit for the organization. Focus on their expectations for the role, basic skill questions, personality fit, and their interview timelines.
• A hiring manager screen: Make sure there is a strong chance that the candidate fits the role. Focus on getting to know the candidate at both a technical and personal level to ascertain whether they match the role needs and your internal culture.
• A technical assessment: There are two common approaches to the technical assessment:
  • A take-home interview, which gives the candidate a mini version of something they would build on the job, followed by an opportunity to explain their work in person. In the age of AI coding tools, this in-person debrief is especially important, and arguably more so than the actual code written.
  • A live coding interview is another common option. This typically takes 45-60 minutes and takes the candidate through a series of coding challenges that they need to solve and walk you through their thought process as they find a solution.
• A “meet the team” interview: This could be a full-day or a half-day, depending on the size of your company and product organization. This is typically composed of a few parts:
  • A technical deep dive with your lead engineer.
  • Architecture/system design discussions for senior engineering candidates.
  • 1:1 interviews with potential colleagues to assess the candidate’s skills, thought processes, and leadership approach. Make sure to include product managers and designers in this group!

Following this, you will review the candidate’s performance with your team to make a final hiring decision. You may want to include the following as you evaluate and compare candidates:

• A post-interview panel to discuss the candidate, followed by a decision by the hiring manager.
• Reference checks to ensure the candidate has good character and standing, and to make sure you haven’t missed anything across the hiring process.
• Make an offer!

Now that we’ve explained the interview process at a macro level, we need to specify how to engage candidates through specific questions, skill-based assessments, and team needs. The devil is always in the details!

How to Interview a Software Engineer

The software engineer role is highly specialized. Keep this in mind as you evaluate candidates. I like to split the software engineer interview into two parts:

• Seeking out the required skills (again, these should be based on your company’s needs)
• Specific questions to assess those skills and competencies

You want to invite the candidate to share real-world examples that reveal their technical skills, problem-solving process, communication style, and impact capabilities.

Let’s walk through each one.

Skills to Look For

When hiring an engineer, it’s important to look for the following key skills:

• Technical proficiency: Strong engineers demonstrate a deep understanding of core programming languages, tools, and development frameworks relevant to the role. They write clean, maintainable code and understand system architecture fundamentals.
• Problem-solving ability: Great engineers can break down complex challenges into manageable parts and craft efficient solutions. They approach obstacles with creativity and persistence. They’re also capable of working at scale, which is key for a startup environment.
• Communication: Effective communication ensures engineers can collaborate across functions, give and receive feedback, and clearly articulate technical decisions to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. This is also a foundational skill for project management and maintaining aggressive timelines.
• Adaptability: Technologies, challenges, and internal dynamics can evolve quickly, so top engineers stay curious. They pride themselves on their ability to learn on the fly and comfortably navigate change in tools, team structure, or business priorities.
• Customer empathy: Engineers with a user-first mindset build products that solve real problems. They consider the end-user experience, anticipate pain points, and advocate for practical, impactful solutions.

Questions to Ask

The exact questions you ask during the interview process depend on the specific role. As a general rule, you can break questions down into the following categories:

• Technical
• Problem solving and ownership mentality
• Startup culture fit
• Collaboration and team dynamics

Whenever asking questions, no matter the scope, I try to focus on outcomes rather than inputs. With earlier stage companies and startups, each employee can have an outsized impact on your success; therefore, a priority on outcomes over “just getting the work done” needs to be a priority.

Technical

When it comes to software engineers, the best way to assess their technical skills will be in the code interviews mentioned above (either a live coding session, or them walking you through a take-home assignment). Beyond that, the following questions can help fill in any remaining gaps around their thought process and approach to engineering work:

• Walk me through how you’d approach building [a feature relevant to your product].
• Tell me about a technical challenge you faced recently and how you solved it.
• How do you decide when to refactor code vs. leaving it as-is?
• What’s your process for debugging a production issue?

Problem Solving and Ownership Mentality

Invite the candidate to share their experiences as troubleshooters and project managers. This is your chance to see how solutions-oriented these potential software engineer hires are. Most engineers will say they can solve complex problems, so I recommend asking for specific scenarios and their thought process towards a solution.

• Describe a time when you had to work with incomplete requirements. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
• Tell me about a project that didn’t go as planned. What happened, and what did you learn?
• How do you prioritize technical debt vs. new features?
• Give me an example of when you had to advocate for a technical decision to non-technical stakeholders. Explain the logic behind your approach and tell me about the feedback from stakeholders.

Startup Culture Fit

Can you envision working with this person and fitting into the overall environment at your company? This is a chance to determine your candidate’s character and demeanor, in addition to what they bring as a software engineer.

• What attracts you to working at an early-stage company vs. a larger tech company?
• Tell me about a time you had to learn a new technology quickly. What was at stake, and how did you overcome the tight timeline?
• How do you handle wearing multiple hats and context switching?
• What questions do you have about our technical challenges or product direction?

Collaboration and Team Dynamics

Determine whether your software engineer candidate is a team player who possesses the skills required to communicate articulately, consistently, and professionally. More than simply being able to work with others, look for an engineer who takes an active role in driving things forward.

• How do you approach code reviews — both giving and receiving feedback?
• Tell me about a time you helped a teammate solve a problem or level up. Explain your approach and the outcome it led to.
• Can you describe a time you pushed back on a product or design decision? Walk me through the scenario and how it played out in the end.
• What feedback have you received that changed how you work?

What Makes Someone a Good Fit for a Startup Software Engineer Role?

Nearly every tech company calls itself “agile and fast-paced,” but this is especially true for early to mid-stage startups.

Your first engineering hires need to think and act quickly while adapting to rapidly changing situations. In the early stages, it’s important to strike a balance between product reliability and the ability to ship code fast. Not every engineer will be able to strike this balance well.

Even the best developers may not be ideal fits for an early-stage startup environment. Beyond the core skills listed above, look for someone who:

• Is comfortable working with many unknowns.
• Knows how and when to ask questions or ask for help from team members.
• Can change directions based on the needs of the business.
• Solves problems collaboratively and quickly.

Beyond code proficiency and a customer-centric attitude, a good candidate for a startup environment will be able to think and move quickly depending on evolving needs or shifting circumstances.

Hiring is Just One Part of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide For the Rest

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element in a robust and effective HR strategy.

The most successful startups know their path to scaling from seven to nine figures will be made possible by the practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
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