Scaling the Team: From 15 to 50

A year ago the VPS team was 15 people. Today we are 50, and most of what I did in between was not engineering. Last December I planned for 30-plus. Fifty is technically 30-plus, and also the reason this post exists.

Hiring at Scale

Going from 15 to 50 means 35+ hires in a year, which is nearly 3 hires per month. Walk the funnel backwards and the numbers get alarming: at 10% offer acceptance that is 30+ offers per month, at 10% interview-to-offer that is 300+ interviews per month, and at 10% screen-to-interview that is 3000+ candidate screens per month. This is a full-time job for multiple people, and pretending otherwise is how hiring quietly becomes everyone's part-time failure.

Hiring Process Evolution

At 15 I personally interviewed every candidate. Deep assessment of each person, slow pace, quality held, and completely unscalable. At 50 hiring is distributed: a trained pool of 10+ calibrated interviewers, structured interview loops for consistency, hiring committee reviews as a cross-check, and I meet finalists only. Quality is now maintained through process instead of through my personal involvement, which took some getting used to.

Onboarding Investment

A new hire spends month 1 learning and consuming, contributes at around 50% by month 3, and is fully productive around month 6. At 3 hires a month, that means a substantial new-hire burden at all times, so we invest accordingly: comprehensive documentation, mentor and buddy assignments, structured ramp-up projects, and regular check-ins. We plan onboarding like real work, because at this hire rate it is a permanent workload.

Organizational Structure

At 15 the structure was flat and everyone reported to me. The first perception team I structured was pods by feature; at 50 we run a three-level hierarchy:

Director (me)
├── Engineering Manager 1 (Localization)
│   ├── Tech Lead
│   └── 8 engineers
├── Engineering Manager 2 (Mapping)
│   ├── Tech Lead
│   └── 10 engineers
├── Engineering Manager 3 (Infrastructure)
│   └── 8 engineers
└── Staff engineers (3, cross-cutting)

We promoted from within where possible and hired external EMs for growth.

How do you keep culture from diluting?

Culture dilutes with growth unless you actively maintain it. We wrote the values down - bias for action, user focus, quality and craft, respectful debate - because unwritten values do not survive a tripling. Rituals reinforce them: weekly demos of working software, post-mortems to learn from failures, recognitions that celebrate what we value. And leadership modeling is non-negotiable; I have to embody the culture I want, or none of the rest matters.

Communication Overhead

Meetings scale with team size: a weekly all-hands with 50 people, EM syncs twice a week with 4 people, monthly rotating skip-levels, and 1:1s weekly with directs and monthly with skips. Managing the meeting load while staying connected to the actual work is a constant balancing act.

What I Learned

1. Hire ahead of need. By the time you need someone, you are already behind.
2. Invest in managers early. Good managers are multipliers.
3. Process enables scale. What feels like bureaucracy at 15 is essential at 50.
4. Culture is fragile. One bad hire can damage culture more than ten good hires can build it.
5. Let go. I cannot do everything anymore. Trusting others is mandatory.