A startup in Spain should make its first engineering hires in this order: a senior engineer who can own the product end to end, then one or two mid-level engineers who ship features, and only later specialists, managers and juniors. In 2026 a senior engineer in Spain's product and startup segment earns €58,000–72,000 gross a year, and the employer adds 32.15% in social security for a software company, up to a salary cap of €61,214.40. A first team of two engineers therefore costs about €132,000–164,000 a year, and a team of five about €301,000–375,000.
What a startup's first engineering team is
A startup's first engineering team is the group of two to five engineers who build and run the first version of the product before the company has a dedicated engineering manager, a platform team or specialists. Every person on it writes production code, and each one covers more than one area: backend, frontend, infrastructure, testing and talking to users.
The first engineering team is defined by scope, not by headcount. It ends when the startup starts hiring for one narrow function at a time, such as a dedicated data engineer, a QA engineer or an engineering manager.
The order of the first engineering hires at a Spanish startup
The first engineering hires at a Spanish startup follow the work the product needs next, and in most cases that sequence looks the same:
- Senior full-stack or backend engineer. The first engineer chooses the stack, builds the core of the product and sets the code standards the rest of the team will inherit. This is the hire where experience matters most.
- Mid-level product engineer. The second engineer doubles delivery capacity and removes the single point of failure: if the only engineer is ill or leaves, nobody else knows the code.
- A second mid-level or senior engineer on the weakest area. The third hire covers what the first two cover least, usually frontend and mobile or infrastructure and data.
- A specialist the product depends on. An AI engineer, a data engineer or a security engineer joins when the product cannot grow without that skill, not before.
- A technical lead or engineering manager. Once there are five or more engineers, someone has to own hiring, planning and code review full time.
Juniors usually come after step 3, when there are seniors with time to review their code.
First engineering hires by phase: salary and employer cost in Spain (2026)
The first engineering hires in Spain cost the gross salary plus the employer's social security. For a company registered under computer programming and consultancy, employer contributions in 2026 are 32.15% of salary: 30.65% in general contributions under the Spanish Social Security's 2026 contribution rates, plus the 1.50% workplace accident premium that the General Social Security Law sets for that activity.
| Hire | When to hire | Gross annual salary (2026) | Approximate annual employer cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior full-stack or backend engineer (6+ years) | First, to build the core product | €58,000–72,000 | €76,600–91,800 |
| Mid-level product engineer (3–5 years) | Second and third hires | €42,000–55,000 | €55,500–72,700 |
| Junior engineer (0–2 years) | After two seniors or mids can review code | €28,000–35,000 | €37,000–46,300 |
| Lead, staff engineer or scarce specialist | When the team reaches five or more | €80,000+ | €99,900+ |
The salary bands are for Spain's product and startup segment, according to Kulturo's salary analysis, and location moves them by 15–20%, with Madrid and Barcelona at the top. Employer cost is calculated with the 2026 rates above. Contributions stop growing at the maximum contribution base of €5,101.20 a month, according to the Social Security; above it, only the solidarity contribution of 1.15% to 1.46% in 2026 is added, most of it paid by the employer. The full calculation is in Kulturo's guide to the cost of employing a software engineer in Spain, and the bands by specialisation are in its guide to developer salaries in Spain.
Three first-team configurations and their annual cost (2026 example)
A first engineering team in Spain usually takes one of three shapes. The figures add up the salary bands from Kulturo's salary analysis and the employer cost at 2026 contribution rates (32.15% up to the maximum base); they are examples, not quotes.
| Team | Composition | Total gross salaries | Total annual employer cost | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two engineers | 1 senior + 1 mid-level | €100,000–127,000 | €132,200–164,500 | The founder is technical and still codes |
| Three engineers | 1 senior + 2 mid-level | €142,000–182,000 | €187,700–237,200 | The MVP is live and the roadmap needs two streams of work |
| Five engineers | 2 senior + 2 mid-level + 1 junior | €228,000–289,000 | €301,300–375,200 | The product has paying users and a round to deploy |
The two-engineer team is the minimum that removes the single point of failure. The five-engineer team is the point at which most startups need someone to manage the engineers rather than only write code.
First engineering hires with a technical vs a non-technical founder
The first engineering hire depends on whether a founder already does the technical work. A technical founder can hire for delivery; a non-technical founder has to hire for judgement first, because nobody else in the company can evaluate the code, the architecture or the next engineering candidates.
When the startup's founder is technical
A technical founder acts as the first engineer and the technical lead, so the first hire is a senior or strong mid-level engineer who can take a full area of the product. The founder keeps the architecture decisions and leads the hiring of engineers two and three.
When the startup's founder is not technical
A non-technical founder should make the first hire a senior engineer able to act as technical lead, often called a founding engineer, before any mid-level or junior engineer. That person chooses the stack, joins the interviews for the next hires and explains technical trade-offs to the founders. Hiring juniors first, with nobody senior to review their work, usually means rewriting much of the first version once a senior engineer joins.
Roles a startup in Spain can leave for later
A startup's first engineering team in Spain does not need managers or narrow specialists. These roles usually wait until the team has five or more engineers or a specific product need:
- Engineering manager. With two or three engineers, managing them is a few hours a week for the founder or the senior engineer, not a full-time job.
- Dedicated QA engineer. The first engineers write their own tests; a QA engineer pays off when release frequency and product surface grow.
- Dedicated DevOps or platform engineer. Managed cloud services cover most early infrastructure, and the senior engineer can own it at first.
- Several juniors at once. Each junior engineer needs review time from a senior; more than one per senior slows the whole team.
The exception is a product built on a specialist skill. An AI product needs AI engineers early, which is what happened at Murphy AI: Kulturo's Murphy AI case study describes how its first hires, when the company was three people, included full-stack, backend and AI engineers and a QA engineer.
Employees, contractors or an EOR for the first engineers
Most startups in Spain hire their first engineers as employees on an open-ended contract, which gives the candidate security and the startup a probation period. Under Spain's Workers' Statute, without a collective agreement that says otherwise, probation can last up to six months for graduate technical staff and up to two months for other employees, or three months in companies with fewer than 25 workers.
A foreign startup without a Spanish company can employ its first engineers through an employer of record (EOR), which is the legal employer in Spain and runs payroll. Kulturo's guide to hiring in Spain without an entity compares an EOR, a Spanish entity and contractors.
Hiring a freelance engineer (autónomo) is legal and common for a defined project. To keep the relationship genuinely independent, the engineer sets their own hours and works for more than one client; if a startup wants a full-time team member inside its organisation, an employment contract or an EOR is the right setup. Kulturo's guide to hiring contractors in Spain explains where the line is.
How long it takes to hire the first engineers in Spain
Hiring each of the first engineers in Spain takes about a month from the first call to a signed offer, plus the candidate's notice period. Kulturo's published target is 30 days from kick-off to signed offer, before the notice period, and a first batch of validated candidates in under 7 days.
Kulturo is a Barcelona tech recruitment agency through which more than 75 tech companies have hired, according to the agency. It recruits only technical and digital profiles, from software, data and AI engineers to technical leadership, charges on a success-fee basis only and, for companies without a Spanish entity, employs the hire through its EOR partner Deel. At Murphy AI it supported the team from the first hires to more than 20 people in under a year. In the words of Marc Sánchez, Murphy AI's CTO: "Kulturo has been key to the early development of our technical team."