David runs every Beacon engineering search personally, across every stage of team-building.
The order you hire in matters as much as who you hire. Get the sequence wrong and you end up with a team that can't ship, or a leader with no one credible to lead. Here's the order that actually works.
See the hiring orderBefore any process exists, you need people who can build without a playbook and are comfortable with things breaking.
Not before. A manager with nothing to manage yet just adds overhead.
Data, privacy, infrastructure specialists earn their seat when the problem is real, not speculative.
This role exists to run an organization. Hiring it too early means it has nothing to organize yet.
Breadth over depth. Someone comfortable across the stack beats a narrow specialist when the whole product is still being figured out.
As the product matures, specific hard problems, data, infrastructure, scale, need someone who's solved them before.
Engineering Managers, then a VP, once the org is big enough that no single person can hold it in their head.
This isn't a later-stage nice-to-have anymore. Even early hires should understand how AI is changing what a small team can ship.
Hiring a VP of Engineering or a heavy management layer before there's a real organization to manage. It looks like progress, a senior title, a credible hire, but it usually means paying leadership-level comp for someone with nothing to actually lead, while the engineers who need to ship product go unhired.
Hire for the problem you actually have right now, not the org chart you think you'll need in eighteen months.
David runs every Beacon engineering search personally, across every stage of team-building.
Book a 15-minute call. We'll help you figure out what to hire next and why.
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