First 10 Hires That Make or Break a Tech Startup
Most startup hiring advice is written for SaaS companies. Hire an engineer, then a marketer, then a salesperson. Scale the go-to-market machine. That playbook does not apply to deep tech. If you are building satellites, propulsion systems, Earth observation platforms, or space hardware, your first 10 hires look fundamentally different because you are building physical systems with long development cycles, specialised engineering requirements, and regulatory constraints that software-only startups never encounter.
The Startup Hiring Plan That Comes Before the Product Roadmap
A product roadmap tells investors what you intend to build. Your hiring plan tells them whether you can actually build it. In deep tech, the gap between a compelling pitch deck and a functioning spacecraft is filled entirely by people, and the wrong people in the wrong sequence can set a programme back by years.
Research shows that 65% of first startup hires are engineering roles, followed by sales and go-to-market at 25%, and operations at 10%. But in hardware and deep tech, the engineering percentage is significantly higher in the early stages because you cannot sell or market a product that does not physically exist yet. The sequencing of those engineering hires matters as much as who you choose, because each role unlocks a different phase of the programme.
The other reality that deep tech founders face is that the talent pool is dramatically smaller than in software. You are not choosing from thousands of available React developers. You are trying to convince one of perhaps a few hundred people in the world with the right programme experience to leave a stable position and join a company most of them have never heard of. Hiring engineers for a deep tech startup requires a fundamentally different approach, and that constraint makes every hiring decision more consequential and every wrong hire more expensive.
Who to Hire First at a Deep Tech Startup
The first hire at a deep tech startup is almost always a senior engineer who complements the founding team's capability. If the founders are systems-level thinkers, the first hire might be a hands-on hardware or software engineer who can start building. If the founders are domain specialists, the first hire might be a systems architect who can translate the vision into a buildable architecture.
What matters most at this stage is not narrow specialisation but range. Your first engineers need to operate across multiple disciplines because the team is too small for anyone to stay in a single lane. A systems engineer who can also write requirements, run trade studies, and contribute to preliminary design work is worth more than a pure specialist who needs a defined scope and supporting infrastructure.
The second and third hires typically fill the most critical technical gaps in the programme. For a Satcom startup, this might be a payload engineer and a flight software lead. For a propulsion company, it might be a test engineer and a fluids specialist. The principle is the same. Identify the two technical capabilities that represent the highest risk to your next milestone and hire for those.
At this stage, equity transparency is critical. Early employees are taking significant career risk, and the standard 0.5% to 2% equity range for first hires needs to be explained clearly and honestly. Vague promises about future value will not convince experienced engineers to leave secure positions. As I cover in competing with SpaceX for talent, founders who are generous and transparent with equity consistently close candidates who turned down higher base salaries elsewhere.
Building a Startup Team with Programme and Commercial Leadership
By hire four or five, most deep tech startups need someone who can run the programme itself. This is typically a programme manager or engineering manager who brings structure to the technical work without slowing it down.
This hire is where deep tech startups diverge most sharply from SaaS. A software startup at this stage might hire a product manager. A hardware startup needs someone who understands systems engineering lifecycle, can build a programme plan that maps to the funding timeline, and can manage the interfaces between engineering disciplines that are starting to multiply.
The other role that often lands in this range is a commercial or business development lead. Even at the earliest stage, a deep tech startup needs someone building relationships with potential customers, partners, and government agencies. In the space sector, sales cycles are measured in years, not months. The BD lead you hire at employee five is laying groundwork for revenue that will not materialise until the company has 30 or 50 people. Starting late on commercial relationships is one of the most common mistakes space startups make.
Filling Critical Engineering Gaps in Your Space Startup Hiring Plan
With the technical foundation and programme leadership in place, hires six and seven typically fill the engineering specialisms that the next programme phase demands.
If you are approaching preliminary design review, you might need a thermal engineer and a structures specialist. If you are preparing for a test campaign, you might need an integration engineer and a quality assurance lead. If your ground segment development is on the critical path, you might need a dedicated ground segment software engineer.
The key principle at this stage is to hire against programme risk rather than organisational convention. Do not hire a role because "every satellite company has one." Hire the person who removes the biggest technical risk standing between you and the next milestone. In deep tech, where the cost of a bad hire at a startup is amplified by programme timelines and specialised skill requirements, every headcount decision needs to be tied to a specific capability gap.
This is also the stage where many founders begin to feel the bottleneck. Six or seven people is still small enough that the founder can know everyone personally, but the volume of hiring activity, the complexity of the roles, and the time required to source passive candidates in niche markets starts to exceed what one person can manage alongside running the business. These are the early signs your startup has outgrown DIY hiring.
When Your First Startup Hires Should Include Operations and People
By the time you reach hire eight or nine, the company needs operational infrastructure that the founding team has been handling informally. This is where the first non-engineering hires often appear.
A finance and operations lead who can manage budgets, procurement, contracts, and compliance is typically the highest priority. In deep tech, where supplier relationships, export control regulations, and grant funding add administrative complexity that SaaS companies never face, this role becomes critical earlier than most founders expect.
The other common hire at this stage is an HR or people operations generalist. At eight or nine employees, the company can still get by without one. By the time you reach 15, the absence of any people infrastructure, from contracts and onboarding to policies and benefits administration, starts to create real problems. Hiring someone who can build this foundation before it becomes urgent is significantly better than scrambling to catch up after the first employee dispute or compliance issue.
These operational hires are also where remote hiring in the space industry becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Finance, operations, and HR roles do not need to be co-located with the engineering team. Offering remote or hybrid arrangements for these positions expands your candidate pool significantly without any impact on programme delivery.
The Tenth Hire That Transforms Scaling Startup Hiring
The tenth hire is where the pattern breaks. Most founders use it to fill whatever feels most urgent at the time. Another engineer, a junior hire to take tasks off someone's plate, or a role they have been meaning to fill for months.
The better approach is to step back and ask a strategic question. What capability is the company missing that will determine whether the next 12 months succeed or fail? At 10 people, the team is large enough to have developed real gaps but small enough that a single hire can still transform the company's trajectory.
In many deep tech startups, the highest-leverage tenth hire is actually a talent advisor on a retainer rather than another individual contributor. At this stage, the company is about to enter its most intense growth phase. The next round of funding will demand rapid scaling startup hiring across multiple functions. The founder cannot run every search personally, and the ad hoc approach that worked for the first nine hires will not scale to the next 20.
A startup hiring consultant or fractional Head of Talent for space industry companies can build a scalable recruitment process, the process design, interview frameworks, scorecards, and competency maps, that transforms hiring from a founder bottleneck into a repeatable system. This is the investment that makes hires 11 through 30 dramatically faster, cheaper, and more likely to succeed.
Get Help Building a Startup Team in Deep Tech and Space
The first 10 hires at a deep tech startup are not just employees. They are the foundation on which the entire company is built. The technical standards they set, the culture they create, and the networks they bring determine whether the company can attract the talent it needs as it grows.
If you are a founder mapping out your first hires and want help sequencing the right roles, scoping positions for deep tech and space, or accessing passive candidates in niche markets where a specialist space recruiter makes all the difference, I would welcome a conversation. I help space and deep tech startups build teams from first engineering hires through to IPO readiness, as I did when I helped a space startup scale from 12 to 300 employees, and the companies that get the early hires right are the ones that reach that destination.
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