You just closed your round. Roadmap is packed. Customers are waiting.
And somehow, adding engineers made everything… slower?
Yeah, I’ve seen this movie. Here’s what’s actually happening:
The hiring lag nobody warns you about
Most founders wait until their current team is drowning to start hiring.
Bad move.
By the time you realize you need help, you’re already 8-12 weeks behind. Your senior engineers are doing nothing but interviews. Your CTO is playing recruiter instead of building product.
The fix is simple but weird: start hiring before it hurts. Use funding milestones as triggers. Build your pipeline while you still have breathing room.
Don’t let hiring kill your velocity
You know what tanks product speed? When your best builders stop building.
Interviews. Onboarding. Architecture debates with 10 people. Suddenly your 3-person team that shipped like crazy is a 10-person team shipping… less.
Here’s what works better:
Hire a technical recruiting owner who isn’t your only senior IC. Or work with someone like Teros to pre-screen candidates so your team only talks to people who are actually ready to ship.
Your builders should build. Not babysit hiring.
Hire for 12 months out, not just today
Sure, you need someone who can build that feature now. But if they can’t scale with you? You’re hiring twice.
Look for people who’ve been in scrappy environments and structured teams. Who can execute in ambiguity, not just follow Jira tickets. Who communicate well, especially if you’re remote or hybrid.
That’s the difference between adding headcount and adding velocity.
Add capacity without adding chaos
Here’s the trap: more engineers = more complexity.
More onboarding. More Slack channels. More time zones. More payroll headaches. More HR overhead.
If you try to do it all in-house, you’ll slow yourself down.
Smarter move? Work with a partner who handles the messy stuff. At Teros, we help startups ramp vetted offshore engineers without the typical hiring chaos—so you get capacity without the operational nightmare.
Systems > headcount
Going from 3 to 10 to 20 engineers breaks everything if you don’t evolve how you work.
You can’t keep doing ad hoc standups. You can’t keep onboarding with “just shadow someone for a week.” Your CI/CD can’t be held together with duct tape.
Invest early in: clear dev workflows, async communication norms, lightweight docs that actually help, and ownership models (who owns what).
Velocity isn’t about how many engineers you have. It’s about how well they work together.
TL;DR:
• Hire before it’s urgent • Keep your best people focused on building • Look for people who’ll grow with you • Use offshore partners to scale without the overhead • Build systems that support speed at scale
Teros is your founding engineering team for early-stage startups. With over a decade of experience partnering with Bay Area companies, we specialize in building high-performing teams across software development, machine learning, cloud-native solutions, and infrastructure.
We've helped startups scale from pre-seed to post-Series A, providing the technical expertise and talent you need to succeed. Whether you need full-stack development, DevOps automation, cloud solutions, or team augmentation, we're here to help you build something great.
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