Refery for hiring teams
Hire a founding engineer
Find an engineer who can turn an uncertain customer problem into a working product, then own what happens after launch.
For founders and CTOs hiring an early engineering owner in San Francisco, the Bay Area, or New York. Start with the product outcome and the decisions this person will own.
An illustration of how a Refery search is presented. The names and grades are examples, not real candidates.
Our clients are backed by investors including:
Make the role clear
Decide what the job is before the search starts.
A founding engineer needs room to make product and engineering decisions. If the work is a tightly scoped implementation task, define a specialist role instead. If you need a department leader, separate people management from hands-on building.
Put these decisions in the brief
- The customer problem and the first product milestone
- Which decisions the engineer owns and which stay with the founders
- Existing code, infrastructure, and technical support
- Location, working arrangement, base salary, and equity terms
- Must own
- The customer problem and the first product milestone
- Stage
- VC-backed, Seed to Series B
- Still open
- Location, band, and the first milestone
What to look for in candidate evidence
Three things a shortlist should show.
Product ownership
A shipped product, the user feedback behind it, and what the candidate changed.
Engineering judgment
A technical tradeoff, the constraints at the time, and what failed.
Operating independence
An example of making progress with an incomplete brief and knowing when to escalate.
Start a search with Refery
One brief. Two networks. A reasoned shortlist.
Refery is a startup recruiting network for VC-backed Seed to Series B companies hiring Engineering, AI, and GTM talent. It combines specialist independent recruiters with referrals from founders, operators, and investors.
Refery charges 15% to 25% of first-year base salary on a successful hire. No retainer, no exclusivity, and a 90-day guarantee under the client agreement. Scope and fee are agreed upfront. See current pricing.
Send your hiring brief →Share the brief
Send the role, location, compensation, and the outcome the hire needs to own.
Confirm fit and scope
Discuss the search, candidate evidence, interview process, and commercial terms with Refery.
Keep the decision grounded
Use a consistent scorecard, capture interview evidence, and give specific feedback as the search progresses.
Before you set the budget
Compare like with like.
Compare roles with the same responsibilities and working arrangement. Our salary guides show dated public posting examples, with base salary, equity, and variable pay kept separate.
A question hiring teams ask
Should a founding engineer also manage the engineering team?
Only if that is part of the immediate job and the candidate has relevant evidence. Product ownership, technical leadership, and people management are different responsibilities. State which one matters first.
From a real search
An ownership brief, tested against real work
In one Refery search, recommendations explained what candidates had owned end to end and named the depth-of-experience question still worth testing. Broad responsibility was not treated as proof that every specialist requirement had been met.
Apply the same discipline to a founding engineer hire: identify the decisions the person must own, then ask for the project evidence and the unresolved question together. This lesson comes from an engineering engagement, not a claim that its completed hire carried this exact title.
The useful lesson
Ask for a reason to interview and a question to resolve, not only an overall rating.
Read the anonymized search story →Explore other searches
Hire a forward deployed engineer
Hire for the point where your product meets the customer’s systems, data, and operating constraints.
See the search →Hire an AI engineer
Find an engineer who can make AI useful in a production workflow and explain how they know it works.
See the search →Hire your first GTM lead or seller
Choose the commercial problem first. Then hire the person whose experience matches it.
See the search →Choosing how to run the search
A referral network, a recruiter marketplace, a fractional recruiter and a fixed-fee service solve different problems. The options, grouped by model, and what each one publishes about its fees.