The founder had just closed a $12M Series A. His two-person engineering team had built the MVP—a working product with paying customers. Now he needed to hire eight engineers in six months while also shipping a complete platform rebuild that investors expected.
"I've never hired anyone before," he admitted. "I've never managed anyone before. I don't have an HR person. I don't have recruiters. I just have money and a list of things I need to build. How do I not mess this up?"
Series A is the most treacherous hiring moment for startups. Before Series A, you're small enough that every hire is hand-selected through networks. After Series B, you have recruiting infrastructure, established culture, and experience. But at Series A, you have capital pressure to scale, zero hiring infrastructure, and the mistakes you make will compound for years.
After advising over 50 Series A companies on engineering hiring at SmithSpektrum, I've seen the patterns that lead to success—and the mistakes that lead to painful corrections later[^1].
The Series A Hiring Context
Before your Series A, you probably hired through your network. The first engineers were people you knew, or people they knew. There was no process because you didn't need one. Cultural fit wasn't a question because the culture was just the founders.
After Series A, everything changes. You need to hire more people than your network can supply. You need to move faster than ad hoc processes allow. You need to make good decisions when you don't have time to get to know each candidate deeply. You need to think about culture as something you're building deliberately rather than something that just exists.
At the same time, you don't have any infrastructure. No recruiting team. No applicant tracking system. No structured interview process. No leveling framework. No compensation bands. You're building the plane while flying it, except you've never flown before and the plane isn't built yet.
The companies that succeed at this moment are the ones that invest in building just enough structure to hire well—not enterprise-level bureaucracy, but enough process to make good decisions repeatedly.
What To Hire First
The first hires after Series A shape everything that follows. Get them right, and they become the foundation of a strong team. Get them wrong, and you spend years correcting.
I recommend prioritizing senior engineers who can hire. Your first few hires shouldn't just write code—they should help you build the team. Senior engineers who have hiring experience at other companies bring knowledge you desperately need: how to screen resumes, how to run interviews, how to calibrate decisions. They also provide credibility when recruiting other engineers.
| Hire Order | Role | Why First | Risk of Waiting |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | Senior generalists | Can build anything | Technical debt compounds |
| 4-5 | Mid-level engineers | Scaling capacity | Seniors burn out |
| 6-8 | Specialists (if needed) | Fill critical gaps | Only if truly needed |
| 8-10 | First manager (promote or hire) | Growing team needs structure | Chaos without leadership |
Hire for adaptability over specialization. At this stage, roles are fluid. The person you hire to build backend services will end up doing infrastructure work when that becomes urgent. Someone who needs a narrow, well-defined role will struggle in the chaos of early-stage growth.
Prioritize people who've worked at similar stage companies before. Someone coming from a large company often struggles with the ambiguity, lack of process, and wearing-many-hats nature of startup work. Someone who's been at startups before understands what they're signing up for.
Don't hire middle management yet. A common mistake is hiring engineering managers before you have enough engineers to manage. At five or six engineers, you probably don't need a dedicated manager—the technical founder or first tech lead can handle people management. Wait until you have enough engineers that management is genuinely a full-time job.
What Engineers Want at Series A
Understanding what draws engineers to Series A companies helps you compete for talent.
Equity and upside matter more here than at later stages. Series A equity has more risk but more potential reward than Series C equity. The engineers who take Series A roles are often betting on the upside. Make sure your equity grants are competitive—not just in number of shares, but in percentage ownership.
Technical influence attracts strong engineers. At a Series A company, an individual engineer can shape the architecture, choose technologies, and set patterns that persist for years. Engineers who want this influence find Series A compelling. Engineers who want to be told what to build belong at later-stage companies.
Small team dynamics appeal to engineers who hate bureaucracy. No waiting for six approval chains. No months-long planning cycles. Ship fast, iterate, see impact quickly. Emphasize this in your pitch to candidates.
Mission and vision matter more when the bet is riskier. Engineers joining Series A companies are making career gambles. They want to believe in what they're building. If your mission is compelling, lead with it.
But compensation still needs to be reasonable. Series A companies sometimes dramatically underpay because "that's what startups do." Today's market doesn't work that way. You're competing with companies at all stages. Your cash compensation doesn't need to match Google, but it should be close enough that the equity and upside argument can do the rest of the work.
Building Just Enough Process
Series A companies need structure without bureaucracy. Here's the minimum viable hiring process that works.
Define what you're looking for before you start sourcing. Write a simple rubric for each role: What technical skills are must-haves? What experience is important? What behaviors indicate cultural fit? This prevents the trap of evaluating each candidate against a different implicit standard.
Create a consistent interview process. Every candidate for the same role should go through the same steps: a screening call, a technical assessment, conversations with team members, a sell conversation. Consistency lets you compare candidates fairly and builds institutional knowledge about what works.
Involve your existing engineers in interviews, but train them first. Engineers who've never interviewed before will default to asking trivia questions or chatting aimlessly. Give them guidance: here's what to ask, here's what to look for, here's how to evaluate responses.
Move fast. Strong candidates have options. A process that takes six weeks when competitors take two means you lose candidates. Aim for two weeks from first contact to offer for strong candidates.
Keep it lightweight. You don't need fancy tools or complicated scorecards. A shared document where interviewers write their feedback works fine. A simple spreadsheet tracking candidates through stages is sufficient. The goal is making good decisions, not building HR infrastructure.
Compensation Strategy
Compensation at Series A is genuinely complicated. You're competing for talent with companies that have more cash, and your equity story is both your biggest advantage and hardest to explain.
Build a simple compensation philosophy and communicate it. "We pay 75th percentile cash for startups at our stage, combined with meaningful equity that has significant upside" is a clear positioning. Candidates appreciate transparency.
Understand the market for your roles and locations. Salary data from Levels.fyi, Glassdoor, and compensation surveys give you benchmarks. Being dramatically below market without a compelling equity story means you'll lose candidates consistently.
Your equity needs to be defensible. What's the current valuation? How many shares outstanding? What does the grant represent as a percentage? What's a realistic outcome range and what would grants be worth? Engineers who understand equity will ask these questions. If you can't answer them, you look unsophisticated.
Standardize your ranges early. When you have three engineers with no system, slight differences in compensation don't matter. When you have fifteen engineers and they discover that people doing the same work earn very different amounts, you have a morale problem. Build ranges now before ad hoc decisions create inequities.
Red Flags and How to Spot Them
Certain candidate patterns predict failure at early-stage companies.
Large company comfort zone candidates have only worked at big companies with lots of structure. They ask detailed questions about role boundaries, promotion criteria, and process. Nothing wrong with this—but they may struggle in an environment where roles are fluid and process is still being built.
Title-focused candidates care more about title than impact. At Series A, titles are somewhat arbitrary and everyone wears multiple hats. Candidates who negotiate hard on title while ignoring equity or scope may have misaligned priorities.
Over-confident about fixing problems candidates tell you they'll bring process and structure to fix your chaos, without genuine curiosity about why things are the way they are. Sometimes fresh eyes are valuable. But arrogance without context often produces people who try to impose inappropriate systems on environments they don't understand.
Work-life balance as primary motivator isn't inherently a red flag, but it's worth discussing honestly. Series A companies often involve intense periods. Someone whose primary criterion is predictable hours may not be happy when crunch times happen.
Your First Engineering Manager Hire
Eventually you'll need to hire an engineering manager. Getting this hire right matters enormously.
Hire when you actually need management, not before. At six to eight engineers, management becomes a real job. Before that, splitting engineering time to manage people often works fine.
Hire someone who's managed before. First-time managers need mentorship that you, as a first-time founder, can't provide. Experienced managers bring playbooks for situations you haven't encountered yet.
Decide if you want a player-coach or a dedicated manager. At this stage, player-coaches who can manage and still contribute technically are often the right fit. But make sure the expectation is clear—some managers come expecting to code and get frustrated when management consumes all their time.
Make sure they want to build, not inherit. A good Series A engineering manager should be excited about establishing culture, building processes, and shaping the team. Someone who wants a well-functioning team handed to them belongs at a bigger company.
The founder with $12M and no hiring experience? He made mistakes early—his first two hires were strong technically but struggled with ambiguity. He slowed down, built a simple interview process, hired a senior engineer with startup experience who helped calibrate, and gradually built a team of ten over eight months instead of racing to eight in six.
Two years later, that team was twenty-five engineers. Seven of his first ten hires were still there. The mistakes he avoided in the early days—over-hiring, under-paying, rushing without process—saved him from the painful corrections that derail so many Series A companies.
Build the team carefully. These hires shape everything that follows.
References
[^1]: SmithSpektrum Series A advisory, 50+ companies, 2018-2026. [^2]: First Round Review, "The Founder's Guide to Building an Engineering Team," 2024. [^3]: Y Combinator, startup hiring guidance. [^4]: Holloway, "The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation," 2025.
Navigating Series A hiring? Contact SmithSpektrum for recruiting strategy and execution support.
Author: Irvan Smith, Founder & Managing Director at SmithSpektrum