Haystack
For employers

Your Developer Hiring Journey

Every developer hire is a stage on a longer journey. This guide maps the journey from your first engineering hire through to a scaled engineering organisation, and what to do at each stage.

First hires

Hire generalists who can span the stack and shape your engineering culture. Optimise for ownership, not specialism.

Building the founding team

Add complementary specialisms - front end depth, infra, data - but keep the bar consistent with your first hires.

Scaling beyond ten

Introduce hiring rubrics, calibration sessions and a structured interview loop. Without this, quality drifts fast.

Senior leadership hires

EM, tech lead and CTO hires shape the next year of engineering. Take the time to find people who will multiply your team, not just manage it.

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