How to hire your first engineer as a startup founder

Hiring your first engineer is one of the most important decisions a founder makes, and one of the hardest, because the engineers you want are not applying to an early-stage startup they have never heard of.

We know this firsthand. We built Stitch originally to hire our own team. Here is the approach that worked for us, and that works for the founders we now help.

It's a founder-led hire

Your first engineer will not come from a job board or an external recruiter. At this stage, the candidate is not buying a role, they are buying you: the vision, the judgment, the odds that this works. That is a sale only a founder can make. Do not try to delegate the first hire before you have made it yourself.

Don't wait for applicants

The strongest engineers are often not on the job market. They are heads-down at a company that pays them well and treats them well, and they are not scanning postings. If you only wait for applicants, you only ever see the ones who are looking, and miss everyone who is not.

So go outbound. Decide exactly who you want, the specific kind of engineer who would thrive on your problem, and go and find them where their work actually lives. For engineers, that often means the things they have built and shipped.

Reach out yourself, personally

A founder reaching out directly is an unfair advantage, so use it. Think about the agency recruiter messages these engineers get and delete on sight: an anonymous sender, "I'm working with a fast-growing, well-funded company in the fintech space" , that never names the company or says why them. A short, specific note from you, by name, about their actual work and why you thought of them for this problem, is the opposite, and it will out-convert all of it. Send it from your own account. Make one small ask: a quick call to tell them what you are building.

Move fast

The best people are not available for long. Once a strong engineer decides to consider a move, they have options within days. Run a tight process, reply quickly, and do not let a great candidate sit. Speed is one of the few advantages a small company has over a big one.

What worked for us

Hiring engineers was painful, so we built a tool to automate what worked: direct, personalized outreach to the best candidates from our own accounts. It worked better than we expected. We were getting five to ten qualified interviews on our calendar per day, and we hired our first engineer, from AWS, within two weeks. He was not looking for a job, but we were looking for him.

That tool became Stitch. If you want the reasoning behind going outbound, see why the best candidates don't apply. Or start a 14-day trial and let Stitch run the outbound for your first hire.