#30 Six Traits That Make a Great Founding Engineer
Traits That I Find Most Important In a Founding Engineer
A Founding Engineer is one of the first technical hires at an early-stage startup. They set the engineering tone for the company and serve as the critical link between the founder(s)’ idea and a fully operational product. In this post, I’ll cover six traits I’ve found valuable when working with founding engineers.
First, what is a Founding Engineer?
It is a general term used for the first engineers at a startup. They are the first hires made by the C-suite to work on the business idea and help transform it into a viable solution (very high-level here).
Here’s another explanation I found useful on Medium:
“They are the ones that got the product off the ground and into the hands of the customers. They designed and developed significant portions of the codebase from scratch, and know the inner workings of the code better than anyone. Beyond engineering, they joined the company at the riskiest point and tend to have higher equity than following hires in comparable positions.” Source
P.S: A Founding Engineer is not a CTO.
In some cases, especially at the start, a CTO might operate as a Founding Engineer if there are only a few people (e.g., 2-5), but they will eventually need to delegate that responsibility to a full-time engineer who will serve as the product architect and the coding machine.
With that context, let’s talk about some key traits of Founding Engineers and how they operate.
#1 Plan for the Punches 🥊
Joining an early-stage startup as a founding engineer is a high-risk move that requires some calculation. Those who join and are prepared for some personal / professional punches are the ones who can make great things happen.
Some of the punches are:
Working with a tight budget.
Weekend calls to fix broken deployments.
Customer calls not going great.
Struggling with customer acquisition or growth.
Rewriting significant parts of the codebase.
A family member not feeling well.
Moving between houses.
Reality is, this isn’t a 9-to-5 cushy tech job. It’s a critical role that requires someone who is passionate about the problem they’re solving and making a significant impact. Founding engineers know this upfront because they’re in it for the long game, so they plan accordingly.
They also make sure they’re getting a good base salary to support their personal life so they’re not distracted midway.
#2 Deep Technical Skills 🧠
Founding engineers need to be technically strong, I’m talking A+ engineers. They operate as generalist software engineers where they handle the backend, frontend, infrastructure, and QA work (with some limitations). These are people who are skilled at solving problems and enjoy a new challenge. Either they know how to solve a specific problem or know how to find a solution for it.
They’re also responsible for later hiring other engineers. They define the engineering culture and enforce good software engineering practices. They can also attract like-minded individuals through referrals to join their team at the growth stage.
Hiring A+ founding engineers increases the likelihood of building an A+ team.
#3 Hard Conversations 🗣️
Being able to have tough conversations is valuable for founding engineers. They’ll need to talk about crucial topics, whether it’s with early customers or the founders.
This could be about equity, salaries, product direction, hiring, budgeting, and more.
A common situation for founding engineers is receiving customer feedback. If customers don’t like their prototype demo or the latest feature, that’s perfectly fine. It’s a valuable data point to improve from. What you want is honest feedback. Politeness can create a bad dataset, which is unhelpful in early-stage product development.
Those who can ask the hard questions and handle the tough responses, stand out. This personality trait creates a culture of transparency and honesty within the team, and that’s something all stakeholders highly respect.
#4 Good Information Diet 🛜
Founding engineers aren’t absorbed in daily startup news. They protect large blocks of their time for deep work.
They focus on solving their startup’s problems rather than watching others solve theirs. The engineers behind OpenAI, Lovable, and Cursor aren’t spending their time on Twitter (X) or Hacker News reading about DeepSeek or what other Agentic AI startups are doing. They’re heads down, focusing on scaling and improving their products.
A good habit of a founding engineer is being conscious of their news consumption (online) and leave room for deep thinking and creativity (offline).
#5 Fight or Flight ♟️
This may sound like common sense, but founding engineers need to double down on the company vision. They’re not shaken by the first bump on a bumpy road. They also understand what it means for businesses to be fight-or-flight mode.
What is fight-or-flight?
In a business context, the flight strategy is about differentiation, offering a unique value to new customers rather than directly competing for existing customers with relatively the same value. The fight strategy on the other hand, involves competing with other competitors by offering a similar value to customers with some different parameters (think AWS vs GCP for cloud offerings).
Companies that follow the flight strategy look for under served market or create entirely new spaces (often called “blue oceans”) where competition is minimal. They focus on innovating in these new spaces and serving new markets without intense competition.
Let’s take an example of a cloud observability startup (Honeycomb vs AWS)
Competing with AWS is a classic fight strategy. AWS provides observability solutions (e.g., CloudWatch) that offer metrics, logs, and traces out of the box. Some companies focus on competing with them by offering better dashboards (e.g., AI-powered solutions) or better pricing, but they’re still playing the same game. Some businesses follow this approach to compete for existing customers, and that’s okay.
However, Honeycomb (founded in 2016) took the flight approach. Instead of building “yet another monitoring tool”, they introduced a novel approach to observability. They provide an observability platform that empowers engineers to better understand their systems and know why things are happening, not just what happened.
This flight strategy of differentiation allowed them to avoid directly competing with AWS. Instead, they focused on defining what great observability looks like and how their product delivers it.
📝 Quick note on fight-or-flight
Founding engineers aren’t typically responsible for this, as it aligns more with a product person (e.g., CEO/CPO). However, knowing this in general can help provide context for the environment in which founding engineers are operating in.
Remember: Slack was originally a gaming company. They didn’t compete for a better gaming company (fight), they pivoted to become a multibillion-dollar B2B messaging platform (flight).
#6 Expectation Setting 🤝
This one is short and sweet. Founding engineers know how to manage expectations with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. They’ll be the first ones asked:
Why the product is behind the technical roadmap.
When a specific feature will be available.
Why a particular idea isn’t possible.
How we can make some idea possible.
Being able to manage different stakeholders and set expectations is important for the first engineers writing the code from scratch.
Wrap up
Hiring a founding engineer is not the same as hiring a software engineer at a big tech company (i.e., LeetCode). This process typically happens through strong referrals or candidates demonstrating deep technical expertise from previous projects. Hiring a founding engineer also requires immense trust. That’s why most founders first reach out to their network to identify a potential match with someone they’ve worked with before and ask them to join their team.
Would I recommend taking the Founding Engineer path? Spoiler: it really depends.
But in general, I admire those who take it. These are engineers with impressive scars from building products who have lots of stories worth listening to.
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