How long does it take to hire a senior engineer? (And what to do instead)

From job-post-live to first-commit-merged for a senior product engineer in Western Europe is four to five months on average. The number surprises founders who haven't hired before and is utterly unsurprising to anyone who has. Here is where the time goes.

Month one: sourcing the funnel

Job posting goes live. LinkedIn, your network, ATS configured. You spend the first month at the top of the funnel: writing the role, reviewing inbound, sourcing outbound, doing intro calls. At the end of month one you have a candidate pipeline of ten to twenty serious applicants and a sense of the market.

Month two: interviewing

Phone screens, take-homes, technical interviews, system design rounds, culture interviews. A senior process has four to six interview stages, each requiring an internal interviewer. Most candidates are interviewing at three to five other places simultaneously; your timeline is constrained by theirs.

Month three: offer and notice period

By month three you have one or two finalists. Reference checks, offer construction, negotiation, signing. The candidate's current employer has a one-to-three-month notice period (statutory in most of Europe). You wait.

Month four: onboarding and ramp

Engineer starts. Laptop, accounts, codebase walkthrough, first PR. Realistically: two to three weeks before the first non-trivial commit, four to six weeks before they are operating at full senior productivity. Their first feature ships in month four if you're lucky, month five if you're average.

What to do if you don't have that runway

There are three options. Subscribe to a senior team while you hire (Stacklane and similar). Hire a contractor as a bridge (faster start, less context retention). Or compress the timeline by hiring through your network only (risky for fit, but faster).

The subscription path is the cleanest because it removes the trade-off: the senior team is there on day one, hiring continues in parallel, and when the in-house team is ready, the subscription either pauses or scales down. You don't have to choose between time-to-market and team-to-grow-with.