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.
Traditional recruiters charge 20–30% of first-year salary and run a generic search across multiple clients at once. Our agent goes deep on just your company — researching thousands of candidates and bringing back people who are specifically a fit, not just generically good.
$500 per agent per month operational, plus a 15% success fee on first-year base salary only — not equity, not bonus. No retainer, no upfront commitment, no percentage-of-OTE gotchas.
Most searches produce a curated shortlist within 2–3 weeks. Signed offers range from 5 to 12 weeks end-to-end, depending on role seniority and your interview cadence.
We offer a 90-day replacement guarantee. If they leave for any reason within 90 days, we re-run the search at no additional cost.
There's an initial voice intake — usually 30–45 minutes — where the agent learns your company, values, and the specific shape of who you're hiring. After that, you review curated candidates as they come in. No daily standups.
Find your founding engineer.
Superposition researches thousands of candidates to find the one who'll define your engineering culture.