How to Vet Engineers Without a Technical Co-Founder

This is the single most revealing exercise you can do. Ask the candidate to walk you through a recent project — how they built it, what decisions they made, and why.

Great engineers can explain complex systems in simple terms. If someone hides behind jargon or can't make you understand what they built, that's a red flag. The ability to communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders is critical at a startup where the engineer will work closely with founders, customers, and investors.

What to listen for: Clear trade-off explanations (“We chose X over Y because...”), ownership language (“I decided” vs. “the team decided”), and honest discussion of what didn't work.

A resume tells you where someone worked. A portfolio tells you what they built. Ask every candidate: “Show me something you shipped.”

This could be a side project, an open-source contribution, a previous startup, or even a weekend hack. You don't need to evaluate the code — evaluate the product. Does it work? Does it solve a real problem? Is it well-designed? Did they ship it end-to-end, or just contribute a small piece?

Red flag: Engineers who have been coding for years but can't point to a single thing they built outside of work. At a startup, you need self-starters who build things because they care, not just because they're assigned to.

Instead of abstract coding challenges, give candidates a small, paid project that mirrors real work at your company. This could be building a simple feature, fixing a bug, or prototyping an idea. Pay them for their time — typically $500–$1,000 for a weekend project.

This approach is fair to the candidate, gives you a realistic signal, and lets you evaluate things you actually care about: communication, time management, quality of the deliverable, and how they handle ambiguity.

Pro tip: Define the project loosely on purpose. How they ask clarifying questions (or don't) tells you a lot about how they'll work day-to-day.

You don't need a technical co-founder on your team — you just need access to one for an hour. Ask an investor, a friend who's an engineer, or a technical advisor to join the final round interview and do a deep technical assessment.

Many investors have technical partners who are happy to help portfolio companies with hiring. Angel investors who are engineers themselves are another great resource. You can also find fractional CTOs on platforms like Toptal or A.Team who specifically help non-technical founders evaluate candidates.

Key: Brief the advisor on what you need. Don't just ask “are they good?” — ask “can this person build and own our MVP in the next 3 months?”

Most reference checks are useless because people ask useless questions. “Would you hire them again?” always gets a yes. Instead, ask specific, behavioral questions that reveal how the engineer actually works.

Questions that work:

• •“Tell me about a time they had to make a hard technical decision with incomplete information.”
• •“How did they handle disagreements about technical direction?”
• •“What would you say is the gap between their current skill level and where they need to be for a senior role?”
• •“How did they perform when things broke in production?”

You can assess engineering thinking without writing a single line of code. Present a product scenario and ask how they'd approach it technically.

For example: “We need to send 10,000 personalized emails per day. Walk me through how you'd build that system.” You're not looking for the perfect architecture diagram. You're looking for structured thinking, awareness of trade-offs, and the ability to break big problems into smaller pieces.

Green flags: They ask clarifying questions before diving in. They mention failure modes (“what if the email provider goes down?”). They think about the user experience, not just the backend.

The hardest part of hiring as a non-technical founder isn't the final decision — it's building a strong shortlist. If your pipeline is full of unvetted applicants from job boards, you're spending most of your energy on filtering, not evaluating.

Curated talent services can do the initial technical screening for you, delivering pre-vetted engineers who match your requirements. This means every candidate you interview has already passed a technical bar, so you can focus on culture fit, communication, and product thinking — the things you can evaluate.

The advantage: You skip the noise and go straight to evaluating a shortlist of qualified candidates, using the strategies above to pick the best one.