What a good hire actually gives you
Ownership. Someone who carries the system at 3 a.m., makes the call you cannot make, and leaves the codebase better than they found it. That person exists — they are just rare, expensive, and already employed.
Your options
Before you post that job description
Your first engineering hire decides your architecture, your velocity, and how long your runway lasts. Teams that get it right compound. Teams that get it wrong spend the next year undoing it — and most founders only find out which one they are six months in.
What a bad hire quietly costs
Recruiting, ramp-up, a codebase only they understand, and severance — then you start over from zero. The salary was never the expensive part.
So what is your move?
Hire a developer directly
Build the team in-house and own everything.
What am I really signing up for? →Hand it to GIIP FDE Ops
An AI engineering team, operating from day one.
What does an AI engineering team actually do? →Outsourcing is enough
Send the spec out, get the code back.
Why does outsourcing fall apart once it goes live? →For startups hiring their first engineers