From First Hire to Long-Term Partner: The Founding Engineer Question

When it comes to VC-backed startups, few hires carry more risk than a founding engineer.

The role sits at the heart of early execution, where every decision seems to have an outsized impact on your business.

Get it right, and the reward is significant. Get it wrong, and you’re often refactoring core systems to keep moving.

A strong founding engineer turns uncertainty into forward motion and helps the business move faster than its size suggests.

Trust in SODA is currently supporting a range of Founding Engineer hires across the United States - here are the most common challenges we're seeing (and our best advice for overcoming them).

Challenge: You’re Competing with Companies that Feel Safer

Most founding engineers already have good options. Many are choosing between early-stage teams and businesses with established products, clearer roles, and less personal risk.

Early-stage companies can struggle to explain why this opportunity is worth the trade-off.

Solution: Be Clear About What the Role is (and isn’t)

Candidates know that early-stage work is demanding. What’s frustrating is only discovering the true reality of the work after you join.

Be open about the demands, the trade-offs, and how compensation and equity work in practice. Explain what the early phase is likely to feel like, not just what the role looks like on paper.

Honesty builds trust early.

Challenge: The Role is too Vague

Some level of ambiguity is expected from early-stage companies, but if your ideas, products, and strategies come across vague to the candidate, they’ll struggle to commit.

Founding engineers typically look for autonomy, so if they can’t tell what they’ll have ownership over, you’ll have a hard time selling them a role.

Solution: Define Ownership Before Titles

The job description doesn’t have to be perfect, but you will need to have absolute clarity on your outcomes.

Be specific about the problems this person will be responsible for solving early on. What systems will they touch first? Where do you expect them to lead, and where will they collaborate? How much influence will they have on architecture, hiring, and long-term technical direction?

Challenge: Equity Conversations Feel Uncomfortable

Equity is often treated as a headline number, when it needs to be a more measured discussion.

If they don’t understand how equity works in practice, what dilution might look like, or how their contribution connects to long-term value, uncertainty can take over.

Solution: Treat Equity Like Part of the Role

Talk through scenarios. Explain vesting, risk, and upside in plain terms. Your founding engineer candidates are looking for transparency.

Challenge: The Interview Process Doesn’t Reflect the Reality

The strongest processes we see mirror the role. Founder conversations, real technical discussions, and space for two-way questioning matter far more than abstract exercises.

Use the process to explore how you’ll work together, not just whether someone can pass a test.

Hiring Support from Trust in SODA

The strongest hiring outcomes happen when the role is shaped with intent and expectations are shared early.

We’ve recently partnered with several VC-backed teams on founding engineer hires across the US, working closely with founders as scope, ownership, and technical direction come into focus. Being embedded in these searches gives us a clear view of what strong engineers are responding to right now, and where teams tend to get stuck.

If you’re in the process of planning your first technical hire, or figuring what that role should look like, our Sales Director, Ryan Jones, is always happy to share what we’re seeing in the market. Contact him directly for a confidential conversation: ryan.jones@trustinsoda.com