Founding engineers

Founding engineers for startups that can't afford to miss their first hires

Your first 5 engineers set the tone for everything that follows: architecture, velocity, hiring bar, and how much time you spend in fire drills vs. talking to customers. HyperNest plugs in as founding full-stack engineers so you can ship 0→1 and 1→10 products without betting the company on one rushed full-time hire.

We embed in the same Slack, docs, and rituals as your eventual team—writing ADRs, mentoring juniors, and pairing with you on roadmap tradeoffs. When you are ready to hire, we help you close the right long-term team and hand them a clean system instead of a pile of hacks.

When should you bring in founding engineers?

Patterns we see across Rupa Health, Earn Life, EatCookJoy, and OddsJam.

0→1 product

You have conviction on the problem and early design partners, but no internal team that can own architecture, infra, and product loops end to end.

1→10 scale

You've found product-market fit and now need real CI/CD, observability, and hiring loops so the next 10 engineers are not rebuilding everything from scratch.

Before or during first hires

You want a partner who can help interview, onboard, and coach the first full-time team while still shipping features every week.

How HyperNest plugs in as founding engineers

Ship product like early employees

  • Own a surface (onboarding, marketplace, AI copilot)
  • Write ADRs and design docs founders can actually read
  • Instrument metrics so you can see what's working
  • Keep reliability in check while experimenting quickly

De-risk hiring your long-term team

  • Design scorecards for your first 5–10 engineers
  • Run and calibrate interviews with you
  • Onboard new hires into a clean codebase and rituals
  • Transition ownership without losing context

Where this shows up in the portfolio

Rupa Health

Early engineering leadership that helped the team scale from Seed to acquisition.

Earn Life

Founding full‑stack pod that shipped a 0→1 wellness platform in 10 weeks.

See the Earn Life build →

OddsJam

Technical diligence and founding-level engineering support ahead of acquisition.

EatCookJoy

Rebuilt marketplace after cyberattack and scaled to $1M ARR in 7 months with zero marketing.

For teams preparing for acquisition or major rounds, see our technical due diligence support.