Your first engineering hire sets the technical culture of everything that follows. Get it right and you compound; get it wrong and you spend a year unwinding it. Founders making this hire for the first time tend to repeat the same few mistakes. Here is a checklist to avoid them.
1. Scope the role honestly before you write a word
Decide what this person actually owns in their first six months. "A Python developer" is not a role; "owns our Django backend and the data pipeline feeding the dashboard" is. If you cannot name the first three problems they will solve, you are not ready to hire yet.
2. Write the post for the candidate, not your board
The strongest engineers filter ruthlessly. A post that earns replies:
- Leads with the stack — "Django, Postgres, Celery, AWS" tells them in one line whether to keep reading.
- Names the salary band. Omitting it puts many good candidates off and signals you have something to hide.
- States the region clearly — local, country, or EU-wide. Be specific about time-zone overlap if it matters.
- Describes real problems, not "fast-paced rockstar ninja" filler.
3. Keep the process short and respectful
First hires often come from people who already have options. A four-week, five-round gauntlet loses them to a company that moved in one. A good default:
- A 30-minute intro call.
- One focused technical conversation — a small take-home with a clear time budget, or a realistic pairing session. Not a trivia quiz.
- A final chat about working together.
Give feedback fast at every step. Silence is how you lose the good ones.
4. Test for what the job needs
If they will work async and own decisions, test communication and judgement, not just whether they can invert a binary tree. Ask them to walk through a past decision: the problem, the options, what they chose and why. It tells you more than any algorithm puzzle.
5. Sort out the boring legal bits early
If you are hiring across borders, decide now how you will employ them — a local entity, an employer-of-record, or a contract. Candidates ask, and "we'll figure it out" makes you look unserious. Have the answer ready.
The one-line summary
Be specific about the role, transparent about money and region, fast and humane in the process, and honest about the problems. Do that and you can compete with much bigger companies for that first crucial engineer.
When you are ready, posting your first role takes a few minutes — and the matching does some of the filtering for you.