Every founder with a technology product eventually faces this challenge: building an engineering team. Here’s what we have learned from helping 100+ Australian businesses do it.
Start With the Work, Not the Roles
The most common mistake: hiring for titles before understanding the work. Before posting a job description, map the technical work required in the next 6 months. Which requires a senior engineer? Which can a mid-level engineer do with good guidance? Which requires specialist knowledge? The answers determine your hiring plan — not the titles you’ve seen on competitor LinkedIn profiles.
The First Ten Engineers Are the Culture
Engineering culture is not defined by values posters. It is defined by the decisions your first ten engineers make about how they work: code review standards, incident handling, technical debt decisions, communication practices. These patterns become self-reinforcing quickly. Hire your first ten with as much attention to how they work as what they know.
Australian Market Salaries 2025
Competitive base salaries: graduate/junior ($75,000-$100,000), mid-level ($100,000-$145,000), senior ($145,000-$195,000), principal/staff ($195,000-$260,000+). Engineering managers typically earn 10-20% above the senior engineer band. Add 11.5% superannuation to all figures. Sydney and Melbourne command 10-15% higher rates than Brisbane and Adelaide.
The 90-Day Onboarding Standard
Every new engineer should ship their first production code within two weeks and independently deliver a medium-complexity feature within 90 days. If this is not happening, onboarding is failing — not the engineer. Invest in a documented onboarding programme covering dev environment setup, codebase walkthrough, deployment process, and engineering standards. The cost is 3 days of a senior engineer’s time. The cost of poor onboarding is the first 3 months of every new hire.
Contractors vs Employees
Contractors are appropriate for project-specific expertise not needed permanently, capacity augmentation during a short-term crunch, and specialist skills too niche and expensive to hire full-time. Employees are better for core product development requiring long-term institutional knowledge, team leads and senior engineers who need to own outcomes, and roles where continuity of relationship with customers or stakeholders matters.
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