How to Structure Your Engineering Team at Series A
The decisions you make at Series A define your engineering culture for the next 5 years.
The Series A Engineering Inflection
At Seed, you hired 2–4 engineers and everything was chaos but it shipped. At Series A, you need to go from 4 to 12 engineers without losing the shipping velocity that got you here.
This is where most startups make a structural mistake: they hire a VP of Engineering too early and accidentally introduce process for its own sake.
Recommended Structure for $5–10M ARR
3–4 full-stack squads of 2–3 engineers each, each owning a product area end-to-end.
1 platform/infrastructure engineer who serves all squads.
1 Engineering Manager (or tech lead who manages part-time) per 6–8 engineers.
CTO who is still coding at least 20% of the time.
Total: 8–12 engineers. This is the structure that allows you to ship fast without introducing coordination overhead.
- Small autonomous squads beat large central teams
- One infrastructure engineer per 8–10 product engineers
- CTO should still code at Series A
The Mistake That Kills Velocity
Hiring a VP of Engineering before $10M ARR.
VPs of Engineering are excellent at managing large teams, building process, and coordinating across business units. At Series A, you don't need those skills yet.
What you need is a strong tech lead who can attract talent, make architectural decisions, and still ship code. That is a very different profile from a typical VP of Engineering.