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Founding engineers
Your first engineer probably isn't going to have a perfect job description. You need someone who can figure things out, talk to users, make technical calls, and keep shipping when the roadmap changes on Tuesday. That's the kind of builder we look for.
Builder signal
Things they've shipped, not just things they list on a resume.
GitHub, side projects, demos, and startup work.
How much of the work they actually owned.
Signal from hackathons, DevHouse, founders, and people they've built with.
A good SWE at a big company and a good founding engineer are not always the same person. Early teams need someone comfortable without tickets, specs, or six layers of review. Someone who can go from "we should probably build this" to something users can try. We care a lot about that.
Someone can have a FAANG internship and still be a bad startup hire. Someone else can have a messy GitHub, three weird side projects, and exactly the kind of ownership you need. We try to figure out the second part.