Closed your Series A? Here’s a week-by-week 90-day plan to hire the right engineers fast, without burning runway or lowering your bar.
The Clock Starts the Day the Money Lands
Congratulations. The round has closed. The announcement is out. The board has approved the hiring plan.
Now comes the hard part.
Healthtech funding is strong. U.S. digital health startups raised $7.4 billion across 244 deals in H1 2026, and the median deal size rose to $14 million from $12 million in 2025. Every one of those rounds comes with a hiring plan and an expectation of progress.
But the money has to last. Carta found the median time from Series A to Series B in 2025 was 2.7 years. Carta’s Peter Walker warned founders: “planning to raise VC money every 18 months is planning to fail.”
So your Series A hiring has two jobs at once. Move fast enough to hit the milestones your investors expect. Spend carefully enough to reach the next round.
Most founders get one of these right. Few get both.
This 90-day plan covers:
- What to decide before posting a single role
- How to build a hiring system in your first month
- How to source and run a process strong candidates finish
- How to close offers and onboard new hires fast
- What good looks like at day 90
Before Day One: Don’t Post Jobs Yet
The instinct after a raise is to post every open role on day one. Resist it.
Posting jobs before defining them creates three problems:
- Wish-list specs which attract the wrong candidates
- Interview loops built on the fly, with inconsistent feedback
- Hires who don’t know what success looks like when they start
The first two weeks are for decisions, not job posts.
Days 1 to 15: Plan the Team, Not the Headcount
1. Start with the roadmap
List the product milestones you promised investors over the next 18 months. For each milestone, write down the engineering capability needed to hit it.
This turns “we need eight engineers” into “we need someone to own our EHR integrations, someone to build our data platform and a leader to run delivery.”
2. Define a 90-day problem for every role
For each hire, answer one question: if this person were perfect, what problem would they have solved 90 days after starting?
Write the answer in one sentence. It becomes the core of your spec, your interviews and your onboarding plan.
3. Sequence the hires
Not every role should start at once. Prioritise:
- Roles blocking a milestone. If an integration delays your biggest customer, hire for it first.
- Your first engineering leader. If your CTO or founder still manages every engineer, this hire unlocks everything else. Series A companies now average 16 employees, so one leader shapes a large share of the company.
- Roles with long searches. Senior and specialist roles take longest. Start them early.
4. Budget honestly
As of June 2025, the average salary for new engineering hires on Carta was about $189,000. Add benefits, equity, recruiting costs and the time your engineers spend interviewing. Build the plan around the real number.
5. Decide what not to hire
Some needs don’t require a full-time hire. Short-term projects, specialist audits or temporary capacity gaps often suit contractors or staff augmentation better. Protect full-time headcount for the roles defining your product.
Days 16 to 30: Build the Hiring System
Your hiring process is a product. Candidates experience it before they experience your company.
1. Write specs around problems, not skills
Lead every spec with the 90-day problem. Follow with the three or four skills needed to solve it. Cut everything else.
2. Design a lean interview loop
Interview inflation is real. Gem found hiring teams conduct 42% more interviews per hire than in 2021 (20 vs. 14), contributing to a 24% increase in average time to hire. For technical roles, teams now average 35-36 interviews and 26 hours of interviewer time per hire.
Gem’s own conclusion: “The recruiting process has slowed down… a lot.”
A strong Series A loop usually has four stages:
- A screening call focused on motivation and fit with the 90-day problem
- A technical conversation based on the candidate’s past work
- A practical exercise close to the real job
- A final conversation with the founders or engineering leader
Every stage should test something the others don’t. If two rounds test the same thing, cut one.
3. Align your interviewers
Before the first interview, agree on the two or three criteria each role must meet. Every interviewer scores against the same scorecard. Conflicting feedback drops. Decisions speed up.
4. Set comp bands and equity ranges
Decide ranges before you talk to candidates. Late comp debates kill offers.
5. Name one owner per search
One person drives each search: scheduling, feedback, candidate communication and decisions. Without an owner, searches drift.
6. Set a decision-speed standard
Commit to a decision within 48 hours of each final interview. Tell candidates the timeline upfront.
Days 31 to 60: Source and Run the Process
1. Go where the best engineers are
The best senior engineers rarely apply to job posts. They’re employed and selective.
The data backs this up. Job boards and company marketing generate 90% of applications but only 50% of hires. Referrals convert at 11x the rate of inbound applicants, and direct sourcing at 7x.
Put your effort into:
- Referrals from your team, investors and advisers
- Direct outreach to engineers who’ve solved your problem before
- Specialist partners who already know the healthtech engineering market
2. Sell the opportunity
At Series A, you’re recruiting candidates as much as evaluating them. Lead with:
- The problem they’ll solve
- The impact of their work on patients, clinicians or health systems
- The team they’ll join
- The growth path as the company scales
3. Screen hard early
Weak screens waste your engineers’ time. a16z puts it well: “If rejections are happening late, your early screens are too soft.” Tighten the first call so only serious candidates reach the technical stages.
4. Review the pipeline weekly
Hold a 30-minute pipeline review each week. Check:
- Where candidates are dropping out
- Which stages take longest
- Whether feedback is arriving on time
- Whether any role needs a spec rewrite
Fix problems weekly, not monthly.
Days 61 to 90: Close and Onboard
1. Make offers fast and clearly
Strong candidates weigh several offers. Speed signals intent. Present the offer on a call, explain the equity clearly and give a reasonable decision window.
2. Plan onboarding before the start date
The ramp is where most hiring value is won or lost. Research from Pluralsight Flow found companies fell into two camps: those where new engineers reached full productivity in three to four months, and those where it took 11 to 12 months. The difference came from planning.
Before each new hire starts:
- Assign an onboarding owner
- Prepare a small first task to ship in week one
- Set milestones for day 30, 60 and 90 tied to the 90-day problem
- Request system access in advance
3. Plan compliance onboarding for healthtech
Access approvals, HIPAA training and security sign-offs often delay new engineers by weeks. Schedule them before day one. Every day saved here is a day spent building.
4. Track Time to Contribution
Measure the time from each start date to the first meaningful, independently shipped work. It tells you whether your hiring is adding capability, not only headcount.
The Five Series A Hiring Mistakes to Avoid
1. Hiring everyone at once. Too many new hires overwhelm your existing team and dilute culture. Stagger start dates.
2. Hiring for headcount instead of capability. A bigger team isn’t a faster team. Tie every hire to a milestone.
3. Delaying the leadership hire. Without an engineering leader, your CTO becomes the bottleneck for every new engineer.
4. Running a slow process. Every extra round and every day of silence pushes strong candidates towards faster companies.
5. Working with agencies who spam candidates. Uncalibrated CVs waste interview time and damage your employer brand. Choose partners who understand your stack, your domain and your stage.
What Good Looks Like at Day 90
By day 90, a well-run Series A hiring plan delivers:
- A hiring plan tied to the 18-month roadmap
- Clear 90-day problems for every open role
- A lean, consistent interview loop with aligned scorecards
- Your first engineering leader hired or in final stages
- Your most milestone-critical roles filled or close to offer
- An onboarding plan ready for every new hire
- A weekly pipeline rhythm the team runs without the founder
Not every role will be filled. That’s fine. The system matters more than the count. A strong system keeps delivering hires long after the first 90 days.
Spend the Round on the Right People
A Series A gives you money and a deadline. The founders who use it well don’t hire the most engineers. They hire the right engineers, in the right order, through a process strong candidates want to finish.
Plan the team before posting roles. Build the system before sourcing. Onboard before the start date. Measure contribution, not headcount.
The next round depends on what this team builds.
Just closed your Series A? Synaxia Group places senior software and product engineers into healthtech, medtech and biotech startups. We help you turn your roadmap into a hiring plan, define each role and find engineers who’ve delivered at your stage before. Get in touch with Synaxia Group to plan your first 90 days.