Start with the org chart you need in twelve months.
Series B is where engineering hiring shifts from opportunistic to systematic. The plan you build now determines whether you hit the roadmap or spend the year backfilling mis-hires.
This guide covers how to build the plan: the roles, the sequence, the budget for recruiter capacity, and the milestones that tell you whether the plan is working before it is too late to fix.
If you have ten minutes before a hiring review, read only this.
Start with the org chart, not the headcount.
A headcount target is not a hiring plan. Fifty engineers could mean ten backend, five AI, three leadership, and thirty-two mid-level across four teams, each with different timelines, dependencies, and difficulty. Map the org chart you need in 12 months by team, level, and role type. Then work backward to identify the hiring sequence.
Sequencing: what to hire first.
A VP Engineering or team lead sets the bar and makes every subsequent hire better. Hiring ICs before leadership means the bar drifts.
If team B cannot start until team A has an architect, the architect is the blocker. Sequence them accordingly.
AI engineers, security engineers, and platform engineers take longer to find. Start those searches early.
The first five hires in any team set the culture and the standard. Weight quality over speed on the first cohort.
The VP Engineering search playbook covers the leadership hire in depth. The embedded hiring scope for 50 engineers covers the capacity model.
Planning a hire like this? Tell us the role and we will map the right approach within a week.
Book a consultation →Recruiter capacity budget.
Match recruiter capacity to the plan, not the current quarter. If the plan calls for 40 hires in 12 months, you need two to three dedicated recruiters working throughout the year, either in-house or via an embedded RPO engagement. Trying to hire 40 engineers with one recruiter and intermittent agency support produces a plan that misses by month six.
Monthly milestones.
Track quality alongside quantity every month:
- Hires made vs plan (by team, not just total).
- Offer acceptance rate (below 65% = offer or process problem).
- Time to fill by role type (senior roles trending above 14 weeks = sourcing problem).
- 90-day retention of new hires (below 85% = assessment or onboarding problem).
The hiring metrics for engineering leaders covers the full measurement framework.
The plan on one page.
The plan is the product. A well-sequenced hiring plan with matched recruiter capacity and monthly quality milestones is what separates a Series B that hits its roadmap from one that spends the year behind on hiring. The RPO and embedded hiring practice builds and runs these plans end to end.
Where a specialist partner changes the outcome.
None of this requires a partner, but most teams discover each problem the expensive way. A specialist engineering search partner shortens that learning curve.
Brief calibration → Titles, levels and comp bands are checked against the India market before any outreach.
Sourcing → Built around deployment evidence, not keywords. Engineering and AI search across backend, platform, data and AI.
Assessment → Every shortlisted candidate is screened by someone who can hold a real technical conversation.
Offer and notice → Counter-offer risk is mapped before the offer, and candidates are managed through notice.
Discuss a mandate →Real mandates, real numbers.
Seven roles across data science, research, full stack engineering and UI/UX design. Each ran as its own specialist search with one hiring bar, rather than a single high-volume funnel.
A Head of Engineering, two AI Engineers and a Product Analyst. Each role sat in a different talent market and needed a different read on what strong looked like.
Hiring engineers where the stakes are high?
If you are hiring senior engineers, AI talent or a first India engineering lead, we can show you what the market looks like for your role before any commercial conversation.
A senior team member responds within one business day. No pitch deck, no obligation.