The non-technical founders guide to technical hires!

In this article, I go through:

• Who is the right engineer
• Example job descriptions you can use
• Engineering roles/titles and what they mean
• What the heck is front end vs back end vs full stack
• Other pro tips

WHO is the right engineer?

Ultimately, this depends on a lot of factors. What stage is the company? What talent can you find that’s interested in working with you? How good of an engineer can you afford? What work needs to be done?

If I were to boil it down, oftentimes early startups just need to build and ship code. Middle management is less necessary when you need to get an MVP into customers' hands. That means that any engineer who can build a product that works is a good enough engineer for you.

Later in the startup journey, you will find yourself in a situation when you have a group of engineers who need to work together and need technical mentorship. That’s when you need a great people manager to be in the loop.

Sometimes, you can find a unicorn at the very beginning, aka the dream hire/cofounder who can write code AND manage other engineers. But often, those folks can be tricky to find (and even trickier to afford). In which case, find the engineer who is a 10xer, meaning the ones who can deliver on projects the fastest so you can build a product and figure out the other parts later. Once you start achieving customers and/or capital, it will be easier to attract and pay a CTO with management experience.

Job descriptions for engineers:

I often find new founders trying to hire engineers or even cofounders without a job description. I get it, it’s ultimately a relationship and oftentimes isn’t a job ad that you post to have people apply for. BUT, I strongly believe that writing a job description will give you a framework of what you are actually looking for and allow you to set accurate expectations for whoever you bring on.

Luckily, my friend Jared Parker is excellent at hiring engineers as a non-technical founder and he let me borrow some of his JD’s to share with you:

Example CTO Job Description

Example Founding Backend Engineer Job Description

Example Founding Frontend Engineer Job Description

These all give you a blueprint to work from when creating your own job descriptions.

Most important thing, you have to SELL your mission, vision, and ability to execute when recruiting technical folks. Recruiting for startups is all about how much you can get folks excited about what is possible.

The role of engineers:

If you’ve never worked as an engineer or even at a tech company, it can be tricky navigating what different roles really ‘mean.’ 

When you’re chatting with engineers, you should get yourself clued in to what these titles are supposed to mean to be able to identify the type of experiences someone could bring to the table for your company.

Here’s a high-level overview of common engineering titles:

• CTO: Sets technology strategy and vision.
• VP of Engineering: Leads the engineering organization to execute the CTO's vision.
• Engineering Manager: Manages teams and ensures project delivery.
• Staff Engineer: Provides deep technical expertise and leads complex problem-solving.
• Tech Lead: Focuses on leading specific projects and ensuring technical quality.

And here’s a deeper breakdown:

CTO:

• Focus: Strategy and vision.
• Typically reports to the CEO
• Responsibilities: Setting the overall technology vision and strategy for the company. Aligning technology initiatives with business goals. Overseeing the entire technology landscape, including development, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Representing technology interests at the executive level and potentially to external stakeholders. Ensuring the company stays ahead of technological trends and innovations.

VP of Engineering:

• Focus: Leadership and execution.
• Usually reports to CEO or CTO (if you have one) 
• Responsibilities: Leading the engineering department and managing engineering leaders. Translating the CTO's vision into executable plans. Ensuring projects are delivered on time, within budget, and to quality standards. Overseeing the hiring, development, and retention of engineering talent. Managing resources, budgets, and timelines for engineering projects.

Engineering Manager

• Focus: Team management and project delivery
• Middle management, usually reports to whomever is senior engineering leader
• Responsibilities: Managing a team of engineers, including mentoring, performance reviews, and career development. Planning, coordinating, and overseeing engineering projects and tasks. Ensuring effective communication and collaboration within the team and with other departments. Handling day-to-day technical decisions and problem-solving. Reporting progress and issues to senior management.

Staff Engineer

• Focus: Technical expertise and problem-solving 
• This person is a senior individual contributor, they usually have a high degree of influence within the engineering team. They don’t want to manage people, but often are technical mentors.
• Responsibilities: Acting as a technical leader and expert within the engineering team. Solving complex engineering problems and developing advanced technical solutions. Mentoring and guiding junior engineers. Contributing to architectural decisions and ensuring technical standards are met. Working on high-impact projects and initiatives.

Tech Lead

• Focus: Project-specific technical leadership 
• Usually reports to engineering manager
• Responsibilities: Lead small team within a project. Technical direction, code quality, and team output Often balances hands-on coding with leadership duties. Code reviews and mentorship.

In startups, these titles often become made up and not totally representative of the work engineers do. Your startup CTO might really only have the experience of a tech lead, and that’s ok. This is just an FYI when you are looking to bring on engineers so you’re not totally lost!!

What the heck is full stack, frontend, and backend?!

Here’s an overview of each:

• Front End Developer: Focuses on the user interface and experience, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Back End Developer: Focuses on server-side logic, database management, and API implementation.
• Full Stack Developer: Works on both front end and back end, handling the entire stack of web application development.

Here’s an example. Think about TikTok- they have a very slick feed. The front end developer makes that feed look super nice and easy to use. But the backend engineers make the algorithm that shows the content you want to see. Both of those things are needed to make TikTok a successful app. In simplest terms- front end is how someone interacts with TikTok and backend is the logic and reasoning behind the app.

*What if I need a mobile app? This is typically called a mobile developer and they often specialize in iOS, Android, or a cross platform framework like Flutter or React-native.

The decision to hire a front end or back end engineer instead of a full stack engineer depends on various factors such as the project requirements, team composition, complexity, and the stage of the product development. Here are some scenarios to consider:

When to hire a front end developer:

• Your product has a complex user interface (maybe with animations, a need to be visually appealing, etc).
• You need skills in user experience.
• The product is in a stage where refining the user interface and improving user experience is critical for user adoption and retention.
• These folks are more crucial when it really matters how your product looks and feels. For example, consumer apps must have talented front end engineering to make them appealing.

When to hire a back end developer:

• The project involves complex server-side logic, data processing, or integration with third-party services.
• You have a ton of users or data and you need a product that is able to scale.

When to hire a full stack developer:

• The application is relatively simple where having a versatile engineer is more beneficial.
• The team is small, and there is a need for a generalist who can work across the entire stack.
• The product is in its early stages, where flexibility and versatility are more important than specialized skills.

It might seem too simple to always hire full stack. That is not the case. They are your jack of all trades and the master of none. Depending on what you’re building, they may not be the right answer. Sometimes people think having all full stack developers is always going to be faster. The rule of thumb is that it will be faster initially, but slower in the long run where you need specialists to come in.

Interviewing Engineers

If you are a non-technical founder, I highly suggest getting at least a technical advisor who can be a part of your hiring process. They should be assessing someone’s technical abilities and skill levels.

That being said, you can still get a lot of the hard parts done when interviewing engineers. This article is long enough, but I am working on a future post that’s all about interviewing engineers as a non-technical founder, so stay tuned!!!

Other pro tips: 

• You are going to build a product, launch a product, and press delete on the entire product. You will most likely do that more than once. Plan for it.
• There is no ‘done’ in software, there is only better. 
• It is extremely difficult to manage and deliver software on time. Deadlines for engineers are challenging. You might wonder, why is this not yet done? Engineers are building things from scratch and they don’t know what they don’t know, so however long they think it might take, it may not be the case. For example, how long will it take to fix the xyz bug? An engineer can’t just answer that. They probably don’t even know what is causing the bug to even begin to assess how long it will take to fix the bug. They may have to spend a few hours to scope out the project to then tell you how long it will take, which is still mostly an estimate! The best thing you can do is to have excellent communication. And be flexible.
• You need to be extremely specific with your needs and what you want a product to look like. If you speak in vague terms, you cannot expect them to read your mind. They might build something that is wrong and then you think they are bad engineers, but that is not the case!! It is your job as the founder to over communicate. This video illustrates the problem that many startups face in an amusing way!