What I learned while hiring founding engineers & how you can "HACK" it

What traits are early-stage startups looking for while hiring "10x engineers"?

Unlike large tech conglomerates or public companies, startups (especially early-stage ones) primarily seek strong BUILDERS (most commonly referred to as "10x engineers"). Even though many of these positions might eventually turn into managerial roles, most founders still prioritize screening for capabilities or potential to make significant individual contributions in the early days. These candidates' profiles are often called "hackers" by Y Combinator partners. "Hacker" traits alone are not enough for people to become technical leaders as startups scale, but they often are the core tenants of high-growth startups' technical leaders.

How do you become a "hacker"? What are some of these “hacker” traits?

Based on numerous interviews, YC partners’ talks, and my own experiences, a couple of strong signals that founders of high-growth startups are often explicitly looking for include:

1. Constant personal side projects, open-source contributions, or an impressive Github profile (don’t over-do it, though 🙂 )

For example, I have 2 friends who are all incredible technical leaders across various organizations and roles (Deepmind, Stanford AI PhD, Microsoft AI, VC-funded startup CEO, etc.). In their free time during COVID, they started a generative AI tool for a VR rhythm game called Beat Saber. It’s a web platform that lets you upload any music and can help create custom levels for the game based on lyrics and beats. While it’s a relatively small project, it does demonstrate the urge and passion to build and create something cool for this world. This is exactly the kind of signal that startups are looking for while trying to identify the top “hackers”/10x engineers from candidates!

If releasing a viral video game generator is too far, you can think about other ways to demonstrate your hacker profile. Maybe a blog with your impressive projects, portfolios, or unique thoughts on the industry, an active Github profile, pull requests in cool open-source projects that got merged, etc. Recruiters and founders are looking for anything beyond a paper resume (and they are often searching directly on GitHub). As a matter of fact, they most likely don’t even read your resume for more than 5 seconds. But they will pay attention to a cool project you have released, a nice thought piece you published, or an impressive pull request on GitHub!

2. “Build-from-scratch” experiences

Joining an early-stage startup is not for everyone. It requires a great deal of entrepreneurship and initiative to be successful. Not surprisingly, these are the core skills recruiters and founders are screening for.

Make sure to highlight all your “founding” experiences in your profile or story. Being a founder doesn’t mean you have to have started and sold a startup before. It can be a new project you took on during an internship without direct supervision, a feature you completely built or rebuilt from scratch, or small side hustles or personal releases. Founders are looking for anything that screams: “I want to build, and I can do it without direct supervision.”

Some good examples:

• “Co-founded a 0-1 project which enables the personalization of any A/B test.”

• “Tech lead for a project that scaled to 1M+ users.”

• “Build various tools from scratch to improve the dev environment and release efficiency.”

• “Founding Engineer”, “CTO”, “Co-founder”, and “Project Lead” in job titles.

3. Work or internship experiences where your contributions made a direct impact or got deployed into production

Most positions at large technical organizations only cover a small scope of a much larger product/roadmap. However, working at a startup requires understanding the big picture and the ability to execute and release against this larger vision. It’s thus very important for you to demonstrate your past experiences where you contributed to products’ core features and that your work was directly deployed into production and scaled well (without too much hand-holding or anyone’s direct supervision). The ability to describe these experiences in deep technical detail is key! Touching on core and difficult technical decisions and sharing all specific factors that went into your choices or building process (to the extent allowed by your NDA) will convince your interviewers that you actually did it (instead of just bluffing)! Prepare a couple of specific examples where you overcame particular technical challenges (and make sure that the technical problems were actually interesting and challenging enough)!

4. Have a good reason why you want to join a startup and why you want to solve THIS problem

Working at a startup is hard, and there will be many occasions when you (or even your whole team and founders) will feel like giving up. The ability to push through in these situations is another core trait that founders seek in early-stage employees or founding team members. To demonstrate you have what it takes and know what you are getting yourself into, you must have a GREAT answer for why you want to do a startup and why you want to solve THIS particular problem. Not knowing the answers to these questions probably means that this startup is not for you or that you are not ready to work in startups.

Y Combinator always tells founders to be obsessed with their customers and to fall in love with the problem that they are solving. This is because when things get hard at a startup (and they always do!), only founders who truly love what they are doing will prevail. This is the same with early-stage startup employees or founding teammates. Founders and recruiters are often directly looking for these passions and obsessions.

Good answers for why startups and why you are passionate about the specific problem that this startup is solving:

• You are a target customer, and you can’t wait to see this product coming into existence.

  • I personally know many YC startups hired their first customers as cofounders or founding engineers!

• You worked in an adjacent area, or this is your hobby/passion. However, you can’t just say it. You must demonstrate that you are doing something about it to pursue this interest/passion. Show, don’t tell.

  • For example, you are an indie game maker and want to work on LLMs to make games more fun and have tried integrating various open-source models into your latest side projects.

• You are an ex-founder and know clearly what you are getting yourself into. You believe in this vision and want to try it again.

  • Being an ex-founder shows that you understand the difficulty of running a startup. So, you must focus on why you believe in this vision. It can’t be generic answers like “good founding team”, “strong VC backers,” etc. It has to be more specific, like “I took the initiative to interview some customers and understood the pain points your startup is solving for.”

5. Be succinct with your answers

This trait is often overlooked but is one of the most critical factors to ace an interview. Giving concise replies that directly answer questions demonstrates confidence, competency, and a bias toward action. As a rule of thumb, answering “walk me through your experiences” should not take more than 3 mins, and any other answer should not exceed 60 seconds. Turn the interview into a conversation that goes back and forth. If it feels like a monologue, you are probably already talking too much.

6. Ask smart questions. Interview your interviewer. Challenge them respectfully.

Make sure you have done your research beforehand, so you show up with a list of thoughtful questions that the founders are probably thinking about themselves. Ask them tough questions, and people will appreciate it. It’s even better if the interview becomes a strategy brainstorming or whiteboarding session. This will put you in a teammate framework, which will make a hiring decision much easier for the interviewer.

Now it’s time to “hack” your interviews!

The traits and tips above are not comprehensive but cover some of the top qualities that founders and recruiters are looking for in most recruiting processes, gathered from tech leaders, veteran recruiters, and my own network and professional experiences. If you can “hack” these aspects for the particular startup you are interviewing with, I am confident that you will probably already become one of the top candidates in their pipeline. For any prestigious, high-growth startup, there are hundreds of equally qualified candidates for any given position. But covering the above areas will help you stand out in the crowd. And sometimes, that makes a world of difference.

Are there any other traits that are important from your own experiences? What are your thoughts on this? Please leave a comment below on my blog, and let’s get a discussion started so everyone can learn more!

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