Should a startup hire its first engineers as contractors or full-time?
When to hire full-time, when contractors make sense, why contractors are harder to trust, and how vetted engineers give you both.
Hire full-time for the people who will own your core product and technical direction long term, and use contract or embedded engineers when you need to ship before you can hire, or when you are not yet sure what role you need. Most seed-stage startups end up using both: contract capacity now, while they recruit the full-time team more carefully.
TL;DR
- Full-time hires bring long-term ownership and equity alignment, but senior hires can take 4 to 12 months.
- Contract engineers start fast and are easier to change, but you have to plan for handover.
- Contractors are harder to trust, because you often have little evidence of their ability before they start.
- Vetted embedded engineers, such as those from Lyra, give you a contractor's flexibility with the trust and talent of a strong full-time hire.
Contractor vs full-time vs embedded at a glance
Why are contractors harder to trust?
The appeal of a contractor is flexibility, and the usual worry is trust. A CV and a couple of calls tell you little about how someone works, and early-stage founders rarely have the time or the technical background to vet them deeply. You often find out about code quality after the code has shipped. A contractor can also have other clients competing for their attention, and may move on when the contract ends.
None of this makes contractors bad engineers. Plenty of them are excellent. The difficulty is telling which ones are before you have trusted them with your product.
How to get a contractor's flexibility with a full-time hire's trust
A vetted embedded engineer gives startups the best of both worlds: you can scale up or down like you can with a contractor, and you get an engineer who has already been screened and works only for your team.
That combination is what Lyra is built around:
- Vetted before you meet them. Fewer than 3% of applicants make it through, and every engineer is trained before touching a client codebase.
- Committed to your team. Lyra engineers are full-time Lyra employees, deployed to one client at a time, so they work like a founding engineer.
- Flexible as you grow. Clients have scaled between one and ten engineers on the same engagement.
For a seed-stage founder, this removes the usual trade-off. You don't have to choose between moving fast with someone unproven and waiting months for a hire you trust.
When to hire full-time first
- You need a technical leader who will set direction and hold equity.
- The work is your core technical advantage, and you want its knowledge inside the company for years.
- The role is mostly managing people.
When to bring in outside engineers first
- You just raised and the roadmap is ahead of your headcount.
- You are not sure yet what senior role you need, and shipping for a few months will tell you.
- You need a specialist for a defined stretch, such as an integration, a migration or a first AI feature.
- You are a non-technical founder who needs a working product before you can attract a strong technical hire.
How to add engineering capacity quickly after demo day
The weeks after demo day are when this choice usually gets made. A practical order:
- Write down the next 90 days of product work. Capacity decisions are much easier when you know what has to ship.
- Bring in embedded or contract engineers for what cannot wait. They keep shipping while you recruit.
- Start the full-time search early. Senior hiring is slow, so start now, even with contract capacity in place.
- Plan the handover from the first day. Require docs, tests and clean commits, so a new hire can take over.
How Lyra fits in
Lyra places full-time forward deployed engineers inside startup teams, usually within days of signing, and many clients use us while they recruit in-house. Our engineers work in your Slack, codebase and standups.
Read what a forward deployed engineer does, browse our case studies or book a call.
