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  • Blockchain Bridge startup hiring: first 5 roles to build a Web3 engineering team safely

    Charlie P

    Charlie P

    @jolly-soap
    Updated: Jan 31, 2026
    Views: 40

    We’re building a bridge / cross-chain product and we’re trying to build a Web3 engineering team in a way that doesn’t create silent risk early.

    We can only hire ~5 people in the first phase. The confusing part is the order: everyone says “security first,” but we also need to ship, run infra, monitor weird edge cases, and not end up firefighting 24/7.

    If you’ve worked on bridges or cross-chain infra:

    • What were your first 5 hires (roles), and in what sequence?

    • Which hire saved you the most pain later?

    • What did you hire too late and regret?

    Real team sequences (even if imperfect) would help more than ideal org charts

    2
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  • BennyBlocks

    @BennyBlocks • 6d

    If you’re trying to build a Web3 engineering team for a bridge, I’d honestly treat hiring like risk management, not like “who can ship fastest.”

    For a cross-chain bridge startup, my first two hires would be:

    a smart contract engineer / protocol engineer who can own the bridge flow end-to-end (not just write Solidity, but think through reorgs, message ordering, and failure modes)

    a bridge security engineer type person (threat modeling, invariants, “how would this be exploited?”)

    Then I’d go infra. People underestimate how often bridge problems start from keys + operations, not just code.

    Also… what kind of bridge is it? Validator-based / multisig, optimistic, or light-client verified? The “first 5 hires for a Web3 startup” changes a lot depending on that.

  • ChainPenLilly

    @ChainPenLilly • 5d

    Small warning from the ops side: a bridge can look “fine” in demos and still be fragile in production.

    A lot of the real pain in bridge startup hiring is the boring stuff: watchers lagging, relayers retrying forever, RPC issues, chain reorgs, missed events, partial outages… and suddenly your team can’t explain what’s locked vs minted vs pending.

    So if you want the first 5 roles to build a Web3 engineering team without constant firefighting, I’d bring in:

    DevOps/SRE early (signer setup, key management, monitoring, alerts, incident response)

    plus a backend/indexing engineer who owns watchers/relayers and reconciliation logic

    One question I always ask teams: do you have a simple dashboard that answers “what transfers are stuck and why”? If not, the first incident will be chaos.

    Where are you right now — testnet with real volume, or still pre-testnet?

  • Charlie P

    @jolly-soap • 5d

    We’re a cross-chain bridge startup and we’re trying to build a Web3 engineering team without leaving the “silent risk” gaps that show up later. We’re leaning validator-based (not light-client). Right now we’re on testnet with a basic watcher/relayer running, but the truth is we don’t have a clean “locked vs minted vs pending” reconciliation view yet — it’s still too much logs + manual checks.

    The part I’m stuck on is sequencing. If we can only make ~5 hires in the first phase, do we go:

    • bridge core/contracts + security first (and accept messy ops for a bit), or

    • bridge core + indexing/backend + SRE first (and bring security in as advisor until we can hire full-time)?

    Also, when you say “hire the bridge owner” — do you mean someone who can cover smart contracts + message flow + relayer logic, or do you split that early?

    If you’ve done bridge startup hiring before, what order did you actually follow… and what did you hire too late and regret?

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