The 10 startup engineering roles you should be hiring for in 2025

What differentiates a product from a Design Engineer from a Growth Engineer from a Platform Engineer? And when should you hire each type of engineer?

At Paraform, we're seeing an uptick in specialized engineering roles on our platform among both early and later-stage startups. As more and more companies look to recruit specialized engineering talent, many are wondering what exactly the difference between these engineering roles are, and when you need each type of engineer.

What should your company prioritize, and when?

This comprehensive guide breaks down the different types of engineering roles essential to modern companies, from founding engineers to security specialists.

Founding Engineers (The Zero-to-One Builders)

What is a founding engineer?

Founding engineers are versatile, highly skilled folks who turn abstract ideas into working products. They're the first technical hires who shape a startup's entire technological foundation.

Founding engineers excel as individual contributors, but also make great leaders as a company scales due to their adaptability and familiarity with the product and company. They tend to transition from taking on broad engineering responsibilities during a startup's earlier stages to a more specialized role (eg. becoming a product engineer) or managerial role (eg. becoming an eng/team lead) as the company scales.

Key responsibilities:

• Build the crucial V1 product that determines product-market fit.
• Set the technical direction and make fundamental architectural decisions that impact the company's future.
• Work directly with founders to translate vision into reality.
• Establishing a company's engineering culture and best practices.
• Move fast and break things (thoughtfully).

Qualities of great founding engineers:

• They have exceptional technical breadth across multiple domains. Their zero-to-one building ability helps them engineer entire systems from scratch, make good decisions with incomplete information, and create flexible foundations that can evolve.
• The best founding engineers thrive in uncertainty. They're highly comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change, building for flexibility rather than perfection. They have the ability to pivot fast and learn new languages and frameworks quickly.
• They know when to hack and when to architect, and are willing to wear multiple hats and solve problems outside their comfort zone.
• They possess strong product intuition. They have have an instinctive sense for what kinds of products people are willing to use and pay for.
• They have the Olympian work ethic required to create value out of thin air at an early-stage startup.

When to Hire: At inception. Founding engineers are often your first technical hires, joining before or during seed funding. They're technically adept, responsible for getting, product off the ground, while being entrepreneurial enough to adapt quickly and take on full product ownership.

Among the different types of engineering talent mentioned here, founding engineers are the most common since they're either the first engineering hire, the CTO, or even the co-founder.

Product Engineers (The User Champions)

What is a product engineer?

Product engineers are the backbone of any user-facing startup; they own building product. They combine technical expertise with a deep understanding of user needs. They also influence strategic decisions related to product design, direction, and prioritization.

Key responsibilities :

• Develop and maintain core product features and owning them end-to-end, from conception to deployment.
• Analyze user behavior and feedback to make data-driven product decisions.
• Shape product strategy through technical insights.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to implement A/B tests and feature experiments.

Qualities of great product engineers:

• They have both strategic product and design intuition.
• Customer-obsessed, prioritizing features based on user behavior and quickly shipping ones that directly improve user experience.
• They're dedicated to good documentation, writing maintainable, well-tested code.
• They're scrappy, willing to quickly spin up features from scratch, iterate on features they've built, and use tools to automate non-product work like infrastructure, deployment, and testing if there aren't engineers on the team responsible for those functions.

When to Hire: Early stage, often among the first 5-10 hires. If your company has a product-based offering, you'll want to consider hiring a product engineer to build, refine, and manage your core product.

Design Engineers (The Form-Function Harmonizers)

What is a design engineer?

Design engineers sit at the intersection of design and engineering teams, bridging the gap between form, function, and feasibility. They have many names in the software space: interface designer, interaction designer, technical product designer, design systems architect, technical UI/UX designer, UX engineer, UI engineer, and/or design technologist. They’re designers and coders, ensuring products are built with their original user-centric design intent and streamlining the time it takes for a features to move from concept to production.

Key responsibilities:

• Design and prototype products, moving quickly from a wireframe to a fully-coded feature without needing numerous explicit design artifacts.
• Refine, and iterate on designs based on both observed user behavior and engineering constraints.
• Collaborate across engineering, design, and product teams.
• Create and maintain design systems that scale with the company.

Qualities of great design engineers:

• They're obsessed with user experience, caring deeply about how people actually engage with their products. This means they are willing to challenge technical assumptions, if it means a better experience for end users.
• They can balance perfectionism with pragmatism, to prioritize critical design elements over nice-to-haves.
• They're experts at both visual/interface design and front-end engineering. Great design engineers also never stop learning, emerging technologies and new methodologies.
• They're comfortable communicating and collaborating between disciplines. They have to explain technical constraints to non-technical stakeholders, and communicate design intent to product and other engineers.

When to Hire: Early in product development, or as soon as there’s a steady stream of design work, so designs can be implemented optimally without overburdening either designers or engineers. If you’re building an MVP, it may be possible to delegate design engineering work to a founding engineer or design-oriented product engineer, but bringing on this specialized role early can lead to more efficient product development and growth by reducing the traditional handoff between designers and developers.

Waiting too long to hire a design engineer can lead to design debt, where poorly implemented design decisions become more and more costly to fix as the product scales. Hiring design engineers early helps ensure a cohesive product experience from the start.

Growth Engineers (The Metric Movers)

What is a growth engineer?

A growth engineers's role is to optimize key metrics to drive revenue. They are focused on scaling user acquisition and engagement through technical optimization.

Key responsibilities:

• Improve key performance metrics and manage technical aspects of user acquisition and growth.
• Build and maintain growth infrastructure.
• Run A/B tests and experimentation frameworks, building out growth experimentation platforms.
• Implement analytics and tracking systems.
• Optimize conversion funnels and developing retention mechanisms.
• Create automated marketing funnels.

Qualities of great growth engineers:

• They have great business acumen and a strong understanding of growth levers. Growth engineers work closely with marketing teams to turn data into actionable insights and scalable solutions.
• They're obsessed with "what moves the needle?", constantly thinking in terms of funnels and conversion rates.
• They know how to balance quick wins with long-term scalable solutions.
• They have an experimental mindset, willing to kill tests that aren't working, double down on what works, and learn quickly from failures. The best growth engineers are constantly running experiments.

When to Hire: Post product-market fit, typically after reaching $5M+ in revenue. Until you've reached PMF, you don't need a growth engineer. Growth engineers typically join companies at Series B or later. If they don't have a 'growth engineer' background, they are often former founders with experience optimizing technical systems for business impact.

Platform Engineers (The Productivity Multipliers)

What is a platform engineer?

Platform engineers focus on optimizing engineering velocity and infrastructure. In other words, platform engineers focus on making other engineers more effective by building internal tools and frameworks.

Key responsibilities:

• Create developer tools and frameworks
• Manage technical debt strategically to improve engineering productivity and system performance
• Optimize eng workflows and create scalable infrastructure for engineering teams

Qualities of great platform engineers:

• They take pragmatic approach; they're good at balancing technical debt with feature delivery.
• They have a long-term view of code maintainability, valuing standardization and consistency over 'just hacking something together for now' (their job includes always considering the maintenence burden).
• They have a 'future-proofing instinct', thinking in terms of scalable solutions. They focus on developer productivity and anticipate scaling challenges before they happen.
• They build flexible foundations that support unknown future requirements, ensuring platforms grow with the organization.
• Their greatest fear (at least at work) is an over-complicated solution, documented poorly.

When to Hire: Platform engineers typically join companies when they have around 30 or more engineers, usually at Series B stage or later. They often transition from product engineering roles, to address technical debt.

DevOps Engineers (The Pipeline Perfectors)

What is a DevOps engineer?

DevOps engineers ensure smooth operation between development and deployment. They work with teams throughout the software lifecycle to make sure code ships efficiently and reliably.

Key responsibilities:

• Build and maintain Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines
• Manage cloud infrastructure, handing system development, maintenance, and operation
• Automate deployment processes, focusing on accelerating development and improving operational efficiency
• Implement monitoring and alerting systems

Qualities of great DevOps engineers:

• An automation mindset. DevOps engineers have an almost compulsive need to automate, not just for efficiency but for reliability. The self-service tools they create empowers other engineers, and the systems they implement prevent human error.
• They're obsessed with system reliability, building robust monitoring and alerting systems (and if those systems fail, they do so gracefully). The best DevOps engineers design for recovery as much as prevention.
• They (and the processes they create) balance speed with stability.

When to Hire: DevOps engineers typically join companies as they begin to scale their operations and need more robust infrastructure management. This is post-Series A, when deployment complexity increases.

Security Engineers (The Defense Line)

What is a security engineer?

Security engineers implement measures to protect company's and users' data from cyber threats, ensuring trust isn't broken as you scale. The work they do safeguards sensitive information and secures data from hackers.

Key responsibilities:

• Implement security infrastructure and protocols such as such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems
• Conduct regular security audits and penetration testing
• Develop security policies and automate security tasks; security engineers may provide security training to other teams as well
• Monitor and respond to threats

Qualities of great security engineers:

• They're proactive rather than reactive. They anticipate worst-case scenarios, and build defense in depth without creating unnecessary friction.
• They have excellent risk assessment abilities. Great security engineers are able to differentiate real threats from theoretical ones, quantify risk in business terms, and find pragmatic solutions that balance security with usability.
• They understand that security is a journey, not a destination.
• The best security engineers are also great communicators and influencers, explaining complex security concepts to non-technical stakeholders. They evangelize security best-practices without creating fear.

When to Hire: Security engineers often join companies as they begin to handle sensitive data or when preparing for compliance requirements. This tends to be post-Series A, but can be earlier if a company is handling sensitive data.

Infrastructure Engineers (The Scale Enablers)

What is an infrastructure engineer?

Infrastructure engineers are in charge of your company's technical foundation, ensuring that it's robust and scalable. They build the foundation that allows your product to grow reliably and efficiently.

Key responsibilities:

• Design and maintain cloud-based or on-premise architecture.
• Implement scalable systems and optimize system performance.
• Optimize and track system performance.
• Manage hosting and deployment infrastructure.

Qualities of great infrastructure engineers:

• They're architecture experts, designing robust, flexible systems that scale horizontally and vertically. They do this while balancing performance with cost efficiency.
• They have an almost obsessive focus on operational details. This can include building: comprehensive monitoring and alerting systems, detailed runbooks and documentation, automations, and failure recovery systems.
• The best infrastructure engineers have an innate sense of resource optimization. They understand the cost implications of architectural decisions, and know when to build vs when to buy.
• Great infrastructure engineers think several steps ahead. They build systems that can scale 100x without major rewrites and plan for technology evolution.

When to Hire: Infrastructure engineers are typically brought on board as the startup begins to scale its user base and requires more robust systems. This is typically post-Series A.

System Engineers (The Integration Experts)

What is a system engineer?

System engineers are responsible for a company's IT infrastructure. They ensure all technical components work together seamlessly, from internal tools to customer-facing systems.

Key responsibilities:

• Design and maintain IT infrastructure, ensuring a high level of system availability and performance.
• Reliably manage system integrations.
• Implement and maintain operating systems and applications.

Qualities of great system engineers:

• They excel at integration, understanding how different systems interact and creating reliable interfaces between systems.
• They have exceptional troubleshooting abilities, from understanding systems in breadth and depth. They can debug across multiple system layers, identify root causes quickly, and and create systematic approaches to problem-solving.
• They know how to managing dependencies effectively.
• The best system engineers are obsessed with performance optimization. They can quickly identify performance bottlenecks, understand system behavior under different loads, and can balance theoretical and practical performance needs.

When to Hire: System engineers join companies when internal systems complexity grows and require more complex IT management. This is usually post-Series B.

Data Engineers (The Data Flow Architects)

What is a data engineer?

Data engineers build systems to collect and convert raw data into information that data scientists and analysts can interpret. They make sure your company can effectively store and use your data assets to make strategic product, marketing, and growth decisions.

What data engineers do:

• Build data pipelines and architectures optimized for machine learning.
• Ensure data quality and accessibility for data scientists and analysts.
• Implement data governance systems with robust validation and monitoring.
• Create data infrastructure for ML/AI initiatives,

Qualities of great data engineers:

• They're obsessed with data quality (duh). They build systems that prevent bad data from entering the pipeline, and think deeply about data governance and accessibility.
• They understand that data pipelines are production systems, and design for maintainability and debugging. They create monitoring that catches issues before users do, and build resilient systems that can handle failures.
• The best data engineers understand the business context of their work. They know how their pipelines support business decisions, building models that make sense to business users/teams and optimizing for query patterns that matter.

When to Hire: Data engineers typically join startups when the company begins to generate significant amounts of data and needs to leverage it for decision-making. You don't need a data engineer unless you have the capabilities to collect large datasets. Hire one when data becomes a critical asset, typically post-Series A/B.

When to hire each type of engineer

It doesn't matter how talented your team is if they're not able to contribute at the right stage of for your company. They key to successful engineering team building is timing. Here's a general timeline for different types of engineering hires:

Pre-seed and seed stage: Founding Engineers, initial Product Engineers, Design Engineers (for hardware startups)

Series A: additional Product Engineers and Full-Stack, Front-End, and/or Back-End Engineers who are versatile enough to work across functions, your first Design Engineer (for software startups)

Series B: DevOps Engineers, Infrastructure Engineers, Design Engineers, Security Engineers, your first Growth Engineer

Series C & beyond: Growth Engineers, Platform Engineers, Data Engineers, specialized roles based on needs

Building a successful startup requires the right engineering talent at the right time. Understanding these roles and when to bring each type of engineer on board can mean the difference between efficient scaling and costly mistakes. Different types of engineering talent each bring unique value, and timing their arrival with your startup's growth stage maximizes their impact.

Because your specific needs may vary based on your product, market, and growth rate, you should always adapt your hiring your company or startup's unique circumstances.

No type of engineer will be perfect in every area; every team needs a mix of strengths and perspectives. The best teams are built by finding engineers who complement each other's strengths and share a common vision for product excellence.

Hiring for a specialized engineering role?

If you’re looking to hire one for more of the above positions, let us help. We’ve partnered with companies like Palantir, Ramp, and EightSleep as well as fast-growing early stage startups to hire for a wide range of difficult roles.

Our expert recruiters work with companies of all stages to fill your most hard-to-hire positions in less time. Book a Paraform demo to chat with a member of our team and learn how we can assist.