Startup hiring guides
How to hire a software engineer
A Software Engineer designs, develops, tests, and maintains software applications. They apply engineering principles and knowledge of programming languages to build software solutions for end users. Software Engineering roles include Frontend Engineer, Backend Engineer, Fullstack Engineer, Software Architect, QA Engineer, Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET).
Introduction
Startup founders often face the challenge of balancing multiple responsibilities, from overseeing product development to managing investor relations and running daily operations. Adding a skilled software engineer to your team can be transformative, allowing you to delegate the technical work needed to build and scale your product. While hiring a software engineer is crucial for startups, it’s also a key move for growing companies needing specialized expertise for scaling, maintaining, or upgrading their software.
If your team is struggling to keep up with technical demands, it may be time to consider hiring a software engineer. Whether you need someone to spearhead product development, build out new features, or improve system performance, a strong software engineer can help alleviate the burden of managing tech-related challenges. Depending on your growth stage and product complexity, you may even need to expand your technical team to include multiple engineers with varying expertise.
Understanding the role
Understanding the role of a software engineer is essential for building an effective hiring guide. A software engineer is responsible for designing, developing, testing, and maintaining software solutions that align with business objectives. Their work involves not only writing clean and efficient code but also solving complex problems through system architecture and design. Additionally, they collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers and designers, to ensure that the software meets user needs and functions smoothly. Effective software engineers are adept at debugging, optimizing performance, and continuously improving systems while staying updated with the latest technologies and industry best practices. A comprehensive hiring process should evaluate both their technical skills and their ability to think critically, communicate clearly, and work effectively in a team environment.
What to look for in a software engineer
When looking for a software engineer, prioritize both technical and problem-solving skills. They should have strong proficiency in relevant programming languages, frameworks, and tools, as well as the ability to design scalable, reliable systems. Evaluate their experience with code quality, including writing clean, maintainable, and well-documented code. A solid understanding of software development practices, such as testing, debugging, version control (e.g., Git), and CI/CD pipelines, is also crucial. Additionally, look for a strong grasp of DevOps concepts if relevant to your needs.
Beyond technical expertise, assess the candidate's problem-solving abilities, adaptability, and critical thinking. Engineers who can break down complex problems, think analytically, and make data-driven decisions are valuable. Also, consider their collaboration skills, communication style, and alignment with your team’s culture. A good software engineer not only excels at coding but also at working effectively in cross-functional teams, adapting quickly to new technologies, and continuously learning and improving.
Planning & preparation
Before you begin hiring a software engineer, it's important to clearly define your needs and outline a strategic hiring plan. While this upfront planning requires time and effort, it will save time in the long run by helping you attract the right candidates and streamline your selection process. Start by gathering input from key stakeholders, including the decision-makers and team members who will work closely with the engineer. Conduct a meeting to align on key questions such as:
What specific responsibilities will this role include?
What level of experience and technical expertise is required?
Which team will the new hire join, and what are the collaboration dynamics?
What key skills and competencies are essential for success?
Are there particular tools or technologies they need experience with?
What is the competitive market rate, and how does it align with your budget?
Will this be a full-time, part-time, or contract position?
Once you have a clear understanding of these factors, you can craft a job description that accurately reflects your needs and sets expectations for candidates, increasing your chances of finding the best fit for your team.
Crafting the perfect job description
Job Descriptions help teams align on the experience and skillset needed for a new role. They help in hiring and evaluating candidates through the recruiting process and beyond.
A job description should include the following information:
Job Title: Typically 1-4 words that encapsulate the role clearly. Eg. Frontend Engineer - Latin America, Fullstack Engineer (Contract)
Company summary: A brief pitch of the company’s mission and direction. Ideally, it should include information about the company’s series funding round and headcount.
Job Purpose: Offers a summary that outlines the role's level, scope of responsibility, and importance. It answers the question "why does the job exist?"
Job Duties and Responsibilities: Includes 5-7 bullet points, ideally arranged by order of significance. This section allows teams to align on the key scope of the role, and allows applicants to gauge if the role is right for them.
Must have skills: Allows teams the opportunity to discuss non-negotiable candidate background requirements for the role, prior to starting the hiring process. This section also allows applicants to assess if they are a fit for the role.
Nice to have skills: Including "nice to have" requirements section can make a position seem more accessible to a broader range of candidates. This can encourage individuals who may have most but not all core qualifications to apply, potentially expanding the talent pool.
Compensation and benefits: Including details about compensation and benefits in a job description helps attract top talent, fosters transparency and streamlines the hiring process. Additionally, it is now legally mandated in various jurisdictions across the US, to specify salary ranges for each role in the job description. Example. NYC, California, Colorado and many more.
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Example Job Description
About the company ABC Tech, a Series A startup, is revolutionizing the world of healthcare with its innovative telemedicine platform. With the recent $10 million investment, the company is poised for rapid growth and expansion. ABC Tech's platform connects patients with a network of top-tier healthcare professionals, offering convenient and accessible healthcare solutions. Their cutting-edge technology not only streamlines medical consultations but also ensures the highest standards of patient care. With a focus on scalability and a commitment to improving the healthcare landscape, ABC Tech is well on its way to becoming a major player in the telemedicine industry, improving healthcare accessibility for all.
About the role We're hiring a early to mid-career engineer to focus on building user-facing frontend and full stack product features. Depending on your interests, there's room to work on backend and AI-focused features as well.
What you'll do
You will partner with our product managers, designers, and founders to deeply understand the needs of our users and create a product that serves those needs
You will develop and execute against both short and long-term roadmaps, making effective tradeoffs between business impact, user experience, and a high-quality technical base
You will improve the team and company –– you will be an active participant in our culture (mentorship, interviewing, and new initiatives)
You will support your fellow engineers through feedback, code reviews, and advancement of internal tools, technologies, and processes.
You will help translate specs/designs and wireframes and abstract user problems into high-quality code.
What we're seeking
Must have
1+ year(s) of professional experience writing user-facing production code
Experience with React/TypeScript and/or Python
Excellent communication skills and a desire to work collaboratively
Experience building and shipping user-facing products
Nice to have
Have a can-do attitude
Juggle a mix of large and small projects, often with overlapping priority and urgency
An entrepreneurial mindset that balances creative problem solving with the desire to run through walls to deliver and own outcomes
A proactive self-starter who takes ownership of their work even when working remotely
Salary and Benefits
$X - XK per annum and meaningful equity
Support for personal and professional development outside of work
Opportunities to grow within the company
401k
Wellness
Comprehensive health and dental benefits covered 100%
Reimbursements for physical and mental wellness
Daily lunch
Flexibility
All the tools you need to do your best work, including laptop, monitor, desk, chair, and more
Flexible work schedule
Unlimited PTO plus mandatory 2 week vacation
We’re hiring remotely across the US and US-friendly timezones
Sourcing & evaluating candidates
If you’ve written a strong job description and shared it in the right places, you should start seeing applications roll in. However, not every application will be a good fit, so it’s important to have a clear process for reviewing resumes and narrowing down candidates. Start by defining a list of must-have technical skills and nice-to-have qualities to help you quickly filter out applicants who don’t meet your core requirements.
Using tools like ATS platforms (e.g., Dover’s) can streamline this process by using AI-powered resume scoring to surface top candidates. By automatically ranking applications based on your predefined criteria, these tools can save time and ensure that you focus on the most relevant candidates, ultimately speeding up your hiring process.
Interviewing candidates
Asking the right questions is crucial for hiring teams to identify the best Software Engineers for a role. Effective interview questions should go beyond just assessing a Software Engineers technical skills and experience. They should also help evaluate the candidate's cultural fit, soft skills, and overall potential. We’ve compiled top questions to ask candidates when hiring for a Software Engineer position below.
Introductory call questions
Candidate Motivation and Interest
What about this opportunity excited you and interested you enough to jump on the phone with us today?
What are you looking for in your next role?
What do you know about our company so far?
Logistical
Are you interviewing anywhere else? How far along in the process are you?
When is the earliest you would be able to start a new role?
Do the location requirements of this position work for you?
What Annual compensation are you targeting in your next position?
Would you require visa sponsorship, either now or in the future?
Are you interested in moving forward with our process?
Role Specific
How many people are on the team you work closely with? What functions are they in?
What frontend frameworks like React do you use for your development work? How many years of experience do you have with each of them?
What backend programming languages do you use for your development work? How many years of experience do you have with each of them?
How much experience do you have doing infrastructure or devops work?
Do you prefer frontend or backend work?
Behavioral questions
These questions are designed to help you assess a software engineer's problem-solving abilities, adaptability and communication skills. When asking these questions, pay attention to specific examples, actions taken, and results achieved, as this will provide insight into the candidate's abilities and experiences.
Example questions below:
What would you do if you were assigned a project with a technology you're not familiar with?
How do you stay updated on the latest industry trends and technologies?
Can you describe a time when you had to work on a project with tight deadlines? How did you manage your time and prioritize tasks to meet the deadline successfully?
Tell me about a project where you had to collaborate with a cross-functional team. What was your role, and how did you ensure effective teamwork and communication?
Can you share an example of a time where a project that didn't go as planned? What were the challenges, and how did you and your team adapt to overcome them?
How do you handle conflicts or disagreements within a team?
Technical questions
How Would You Design Twitter?
Write up the data model
How would you model Tweets, Likes, Followers, Replies?
How would you explain APIs to non-technical stakeholders?
What do you think are the most important aspects to pay attention to when reviewing another team member’s code?
Please explain big-O notation in the simplest terms.
Here is a simple programming challenge. Could you have a go at solving it?
Example question 1 (shorter time frame): Write a function to compute the Nth Fibonacci number.
Example question 2 (longer time frame): Write a function that takes the current position of a knight on a chessboard, and returns a preliminary list of possible moves the knight could make. (That is, the current positions of other pieces are not provided, so you can’t check against capturing pieces on the knight’s own side nor making their king vulnerable to capture.)
Track candidates from application to offer with Dover’s free ATS
If you want to have a birds-eye view of the hiring process from application to offer, an applicant tracking system is your solution. Unfortunately, many applicant tracking systems are expensive and startups burn money on them.
Why not use a free ATS instead? Dover’s ATS provides you with best-in-class features at no cost. You can access job description templates, schedule interviews with one click, view all applicants in one intuitive kanban view, see applicant feedback and scores, collaborate with other stakeholders on your hiring team and much more. Get set up with Dover in minutes if you want to make your hiring process seamless and less time-consuming.
Hire top talent fast with Dover!
Top talent can be hard to find, but they’re out there. With the right tools, you can get connected to the best people for the job fast. That’s where Dover can help. Dover’s ATS and hiring tools can help you through every step of the hiring process, whether you’re looking for developers, sales, customer support or any other role.
Ready to find your next stellar hire? Start your search with Dover today.
Interviewing candidates
