If you're an early stage startup with a technical buyer, I'd be willing to bet that the majority of your first few hires will be engineers. And you've probably hired engineers before! But hiring them at the early stage, when your company is completely unproven, is a completely different ballgame. What's the right profile? How should comp work? How do you interview properly? Does it matter if someone only has big company experience?

In this installment of Technical Recruiting Playbooks, I interviewed Tido Carriero, Adam Jacob and Vicki Cheung on the intricate world of engineering hiring for early stage startups. Check below for more info on each episode.

Adam Jacob

Adam Jacob is the CEO and co-founder of System Initiative and was previously the CTO and co-founder of Chef. The discussion centers around building world-class engineering teams. Adam shares mistakes he made in past early engineering hiring, emphasizing the importance of fair compensation, and the value of having highly motivated and happy team members. He highlights the significance of curiosity and taste in early engineers, and gives details on the interview process he uses to evaluate these qualities.

Tido Carriero

Tido Carriero, the founder of Koala and former VP of Engineering and CPO at Segment, talks about his systematic approach to hiring and building teams. He dives into:

• The intricacies of hiring before and after product-market fit
• The importance of understanding a candidate's trajectory, and the value of conducting focused interviews that capture career growth.
• The significance of accurately portraying the company's unique engineering brand and crafting tailored pitches that resonate with candidates
• Evaluating candidates based on their comfort with ambiguity and adaptability in pre-PMF stages
• The need for strong evaluation practices like trial periods

Vicki Cheung

Vicki Cheung, a three-time founding engineer, co-founder and CTO of Gantry, and former founding engineer at OpenAI, discusses:

• Her experiences in building engineering teams at various startups
• The significance of finding founding engineers who possess strong ownership mentality, proactiveness, and an eagerness to learn about both user needs and business goals
• The challenges of hiring engineers from larger companies and adjusting their mindset to embrace strong ownership without territoriality
• The value of intentional and explicit conversations about goals, potential, and alignment to ensure team members' success.