Sri AnnamalaiBuilding an engineering team that survives its founders
Grew a four-person team to nineteen across a Series A, with a hiring bar and an on-call rotation that outlasted my engagement.
- Team grew from 4 to 19 engineers with one regretted hire
- On-call rotation moved off the two founders within five months
- SOC 2 Type II achieved without pausing product delivery
Both founders were still on call when I arrived, which capped the company at whatever those two people could personally carry. The technical work was secondary; the real constraint was that nobody else was allowed to be responsible.
We wrote the hiring bar down first, then interviewed against it rather than against taste. Eleven of the nineteen hires came through a single structured loop built around a real stuck decision.
The compliance work landed in the same period, deliberately. Audit controls are much cheaper to introduce while a team is still forming its habits than to retrofit later.
- Python
- Django
- Postgres
- Terraform
- GCP