Scaling Engineering Teams

Scaling an engineering team is one of the most challenging aspects of growing a tech company. Here's what I learned scaling from 5 to 50+ engineers.

The Challenges - Maintaining code quality, preserving company culture, keeping communication effective, and ensuring consistent processes across teams.

Hire for Culture Add Not Culture Fit - Look for people who bring new perspectives while sharing core values. Diversity of thought leads to better solutions.

Implement Strong Processes Early - Code reviews, documentation standards, testing requirements, and deployment procedures should be established before you need them.

Create Clear Career Paths - Engineers need to see growth opportunities. Define levels, expectations, and promotion criteria clearly.

Invest in Tooling and Infrastructure - Good tools multiply team effectiveness. Invest in CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and development environments.

The Results - We maintained 99.9% uptime, reduced deployment time by 70%, kept employee satisfaction above 90%, and delivered features 40% faster.