Founding Engineer for Hire
The first technical hire at a startup makes or breaks the product. We step in as your founding engineer — understanding your business, talking to your users, making the architecture decisions, and building your product. Without requiring equity or a full-time commitment.
Let's talk about your product →What is a Founding Engineer?
A founding engineer isn't just a developer. They're the person who translates a founder's vision into a working product — making critical decisions about architecture, technology, and what to build first.
Understands the problem
A founding engineer sits with you, learns your business, talks to your users. They don't wait for a spec — they help figure out what needs to be built and why.
Makes architecture decisions
They choose the tech stack, design the data model, set up the infrastructure. These early decisions determine whether the product can scale or needs to be rewritten.
Ships production code
Not just strategy. A founding engineer writes the code, deploys it, monitors it, fixes it at 2 AM. They own the product technically from end to end.
How we work as your founding engineer
We don't just execute tasks from a backlog. We embed in your business and operate like a cofounder.
We learn your business
We start by understanding your market, your users, and the problem you're solving. We talk to your customers if needed. This is how we make the right product decisions — not by guessing, but by knowing.
We shape the product together
What should we build first? What can we skip? What's the simplest architecture that solves the real problem? We make these decisions with you, not for you.
We build with AI-amplified speed
We use AI coding tools daily to ship at a pace that feels unreasonable. Senior engineering judgment combined with AI tooling means a two-person team delivers like ten.
We iterate based on reality
Ship, learn, adjust. We stay close to your users and your metrics. The product evolves based on what actually works — not what a roadmap said six weeks ago.
Why a founding engineer instead of...
...hiring a CTO?
A CTO costs equity you don't want to give yet, a salary you may not be able to afford, and months of recruitment. A founding engineer gives you the same technical leadership on flexible terms — start in 5 days, pause when you need to.
...hiring an agency?
Agencies deliver code, not product insight. They execute specs — they don't challenge your assumptions, talk to your users, or care about the outcome beyond the contract. A founding engineer is invested in your product's success.
...hiring freelancers?
Freelancers are great for defined tasks. But they don't make architecture decisions, they don't shape the product, and they don't bring strategic thinking. You still need someone to decide what they should build.
What you get
Product thinking
We don't just ask "how should we build this?" — we ask "should we build this at all?" and "what's the fastest way to validate this with real users?"
Architecture decisions
Stack selection, data modeling, infrastructure, deployment strategy. The decisions that determine whether you're building on rock or sand.
Production-grade code
Not prototypes — real, tested, maintainable code. Elixir, Phoenix, React, Next.js, Rails. Whatever the problem demands.
AI-amplified velocity
We processed 2.5 billion tokens building our last product. AI isn't a buzzword for us — it's how we ship 483K lines of code in 2.5 months with two people.
Our track record
We're Piotr and Kasia. Between us, over 20 years of experience building products — from early-stage startups to systems serving millions.
We wrote about how the developer role is shifting toward exactly this — founding engineers who understand the problem, shape the product, and use AI to build at extraordinary speed.
Read: The Developer Role Is Changing →Founding engineer FAQ
What is a founding engineer?
A founding engineer is the first (or one of the first) technical hires at an early-stage startup. Unlike a regular developer who implements a spec, a founding engineer helps decide what to build: they learn the business, talk to users, choose the tech stack, design the architecture, and ship production code end to end. They combine senior engineering with product judgment and take ownership of the product technically from day one.
What does a founding engineer do?
A founding engineer sets the technical foundation of the product. That means choosing the stack and architecture, standing up the infrastructure and deployment pipeline, building the first version of the product, and making the early trade-offs (what to build now, what to defer) that determine whether the product can scale later. They also own reliability — deploying, monitoring, and fixing issues in production.
Founding engineer vs. CTO: what's the difference?
A CTO is an executive role focused on technical strategy, hiring, and leading a team over the long term. A founding engineer is hands-on: they personally build the product in the earliest stage, often before there is a team to lead. Many early startups need someone shipping code and making architecture decisions more than they need a full-time executive — a founding engineer fills that gap. See our guide comparing founding engineer vs. CTO for early-stage startups.
Do founding engineers get equity?
Traditionally yes — a full-time founding engineer joining as an early employee usually receives meaningful equity (often 0.5%–2%+) alongside salary. But you can also engage a founding engineer as a service, without equity or a full-time commitment: you get the same senior, product-minded engineering on a flexible basis and keep full ownership of your company. That's the model we offer.
How do you hire a founding engineer for a startup?
You can hire a founding engineer full-time (competing for a scarce senior generalist willing to take equity risk) or engage one on a fractional, no-equity basis. We work the second way: two senior engineers embed as your founding engineer, understand the problem, and build your product in 4–10 weeks — no recruitment cycle, no equity, cancel anytime.
Ready for a founding engineer?
Whether you're pre-seed, have a vibe-coded prototype that needs to become production-ready, or need senior technical leadership to guide your product — we'd love to hear your story.