Hire a Founding Engineer
Your first engineering hire will define your technical culture. Get it right.
Why founding engineer hires are uniquely hard
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
A founding engineer isn't just a senior developer. They're the person who sets the technical direction, makes build-vs-buy decisions under pressure, and becomes the gravitational center of your engineering culture. The wrong hire here doesn't just slow you down. It compounds.
Traditional recruiters don't understand this distinction. They'll send you senior engineers from big companies who've never built from zero. LinkedIn filters can't capture the difference between someone who's shipped at scale and someone who can ship from nothing.
The candidates you actually want (builders with taste, who've done 0-to-1 before) aren't actively looking. They're heads-down on something. You need to find them, understand what they care about, and make a compelling case.
How Superposition finds your founding engineer
Voice-driven intake
Our AI talks with you to understand the oddly specific shape of your ideal founding engineer, not just skills, but values, working style, and what 0-to-1 means for your company.
Deep research beyond LinkedIn
We crawl open source contributions, personal sites, blog posts, and technical writing to find builders who think the way you need.
Personalized outreach
No templates. Every message sounds like your company and speaks to what the candidate actually cares about.
Full-funnel support
From first contact through signed offer: scheduling, feedback loops, negotiation support. We stay with you the entire way.
Questions.
Answered.
No. A senior engineer executes well inside a system somebody else designed. A founding engineer decides what the system is, makes build-versus-buy calls with no precedent, and sets the bar every later hire is measured against.
Typically well above a standard early-employee grant, and the conversation usually starts at a number that makes founders flinch. What moves candidates more is clarity on scope and ownership.
If you want someone who takes equity in exchange for salary risk and shares the company-building, that is a cofounder. If you want a first employee with deep ownership and normal employment terms, that is a founding engineer.
Longer than a mid-level engineering search, because the pool is small and everyone in it is being courted. Most run six to ten weeks from intake to signed offer.
Find your founding engineer.
Superposition researches thousands of candidates to find the one who'll define your engineering culture.