How to plan your first five engineering hires

Map the work before choosing five titles

Your first hires should cover the work the business needs, not reproduce a generic organisation chart. List the product, infrastructure, data and research responsibilities. Identify what founders and existing team members can already own. Five hires is a planning exercise, not a claim that every startup needs the same team size or sequence.

Find the first dependency

Start with the work that unlocks the next useful outcome. If nobody can maintain the core product, adding a specialist may create more coordination than progress. If the product depends on research, define the research and implementation responsibilities together. Explain why each hire comes before the next.

Give each person support and authority

A new hire needs someone who can make decisions, provide context and review relevant work. Decide who sets priorities and how disagreements are resolved. Be explicit when someone will be the first person in their discipline. Autonomy is not the same as being left without support.

Plan compensation across the team

Compare scope and seniority consistently rather than negotiating each role without reference to the others. Use relevant local employer adverts as context and discuss equity terms separately. Keep room in the plan for later responsibilities and promotions without inventing stage-based compensation rules.

Test how the roles work together

Review the responsibilities as a team: which decisions overlap, where ownership is missing and who handles handover between research, engineering and product. Ask each candidate about work across these boundaries. Shared hobbies may help a conversation, but assessment should remain connected to the role and working environment.

Learn from a real team build

Before Corellia Talent, Josh made 5+ hires exclusively for a seed-stage London AI startup. The work involved finding technical ability alongside motivation and fit for the environment the founder was building. The company later raised a Series A; that milestone is not attributed to recruitment. The experience informs a considered discussion about several hires working together.

Check the compensation assumptions.

Our salary guide separates advertised pay, disclosed equity and bonus from planning estimates. Compare the role, location and company context before using a figure in a decision.

Questions founders ask