The round is the easy part. The team is the promise.
You raised on a plan that assumes a team you do not have yet. Series A is where hiring stops being opportunistic and has to become a repeatable process — usually before anyone has time to build one.
What actually makes hiring hard here.
You need to go from five engineers to twenty in a year, and the bar has to hold. The two failure modes are symmetrical: hire too slowly and you miss the plan you raised on; hire too fast and you spend the Series B fixing it. Meanwhile founder time, which was the recruiting engine at seed, is now the constraint.
Who to hire, and in what order.
Somewhere between eight and fifteen engineers you need someone who owns the team rather than the code. Hire them before the team, not after — senior leaders do not want to inherit a group they did not choose, assembled against a bar they did not set.
Infrastructure, data, security. The things a generalist team has been holding together and that are now starting to cost you weeks.
Platform and developer-experience engineers. Under-hired at this stage because their output is other people’s velocity, which no one attributes to them.
Hiring the team before the leader
Hiring six good engineers and then spending nine months searching for someone to lead them is the most expensive sequencing error at this stage. The search stalls because nobody senior wants an inherited team, and the two best of the six leave inside a year.
Frequently asked questions
Usually between eight and fifteen engineers, or earlier if the founders have stopped writing code and are spending their weeks on people problems. Earlier than that and there is not enough to lead, so a strong candidate either leaves or resents the role. Later and the founders become the bottleneck for every decision. The clearest signal is when a founder is doing more management than building and hiring is slipping because of it.
Write the rubric down before the volume arrives. Most bar-drops are not decisions — they happen because five interviewers hold five different standards in their heads and the average drifts under pressure. A written rubric per role, the same questions for every candidate, and scores recorded against evidence keep the bar honest when you are hiring three people a month. The second thing is to keep one person accountable for quality across the whole pipeline.
The rough break-even is volume. An in-house recruiter can realistically run six to ten searches at once. If you are hiring more than about twelve people a year on a steady basis, in-house is cheaper per hire and better for candidate experience. Below that, or for unusually senior and specialised roles, an external partner is more efficient — you are buying reach you cannot justify keeping on payroll.
A year is realistic with a dedicated recruiting function. Six months is possible if you are paying at market, have a leader in place and are running a tight process, and it will consume a lot of senior engineering time — budget roughly 42 hours per role on interviewing alone. Anything faster usually means the bar moved, and you find out about it two quarters later.
Make hiring the thing you’re good at.
Seed, Series A to D, or enterprise — send us one hard role. We'll match it the same day, and you'll meet a shortlist in days. Pay only when they join.