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10 Startup Jobs That Are Crucial But Rarely Hired Early Enough
Hiring is a game of leverage. Growth stage startups that think beyond the obvious roles can set ... More themselves up for faster execution and less firefighting. In this article we explore the undervalued roles in a startup team.
After the very early stages, once an enterprise starts growing (organically or through funding), founders often focus on hiring exclusively developers and salespeople. While those roles are essential, many equally important functions are either delayed or handled ad hoc, leading to inefficiencies, burnout, or missed opportunities.
This article explores roles that are often underestimated or under-prioritized in the early days but can dramatically improve startup execution, speed, and resilience.
1. Generalist Operations Lead
Every startup needs someone who can connect the dots across tools, people, and workflows. Yet early operations hires are often postponed until 'things are chaotic,' which is precisely when it becomes hardest to onboard one.
Early-stage ops leads don't just 'keep the lights on'; they handle finance, vendor setup, customer support, legal paperwork, internal tooling, and logistics.
Hiring someone who thrives in ambiguity can free up the founders to focus on growth or product, which is extremely important if the founder or founders are technical specialists.
2. Technical Program Manager
Even startups with a solid engineering team often delay hiring a TPM, thinking it's only needed at scale. But the earlier you have someone who can manage cross-functional planning, organize releases, and flag bottlenecks, the faster your product can evolve.
This role becomes critical when product, engineering, and design start pulling in different directions. At companies like Stripe and Airbnb, early TPMs were instrumental in translating vision into execution.
3. Customer Success
Support is reactive. Success is proactive. Early-stage startups often overlook customer success until churn becomes a problem, but by then, valuable insight has already been lost.
Hiring someone who can onboard customers, collect feedback, and monitor usage helps prevent silent churn and can increase retention early.
Startups like Notion and Figma invested early in community-style customer engagement, which gave them feedback loops before they scaled.
4. Recruiter Оr Talent Lead
Founders often do all hiring themselves early on, which makes sense, up to a point. But once you're hiring for more than one role at a time or scaling beyond referrals, a dedicated recruiter or talent lead can save enormous time.
This role pays off quickly: crafting job descriptions, managing funnels, and keeping momentum in candidate conversations is a full-time job. Startups that delay this hire often miss great candidates due to slow or inconsistent processes.
5. Finance And Accounting Lead
Most startups wait until their first funding round is closed or until taxes are due to think about finance. But early financial hygiene - managing burn, forecasting runway, and tracking invoices, often prevents costly mistakes down the line.
An experienced part-time finance operator or early controller can help founders make better decisions without relying only on gut feeling.
6. Product Marketing
Marketing isn't just for after product-market fit. A product marketer can help shape how the product is positioned from day one, run early customer interviews, and test narratives.
In startups like Slack and Superhuman, early PMMs played a crucial role in crafting language that resonated. Without this role, products often struggle to articulate value, which slows down both user acquisition and fundraising.
7. Internal Tools Engineer / No-Code Ops
As teams grow, inefficiencies compound. Startups that invest early in internal tooling via software engineers or no-code automation specialists scale faster and with fewer headaches.
This hire helps automate onboarding, reporting, internal dashboards, and repetitive tasks. It's a multiplier role — especially in lean teams.
8. Design Systems Or UX Ops
Founders often hire designers to work on user interfaces, but few think about UX infrastructure. A systems thinker in design can help enforce consistency, build component libraries, and reduce the design-to-dev gap.
For startups shipping fast and often, this role helps avoid messy product interfaces that become expensive to clean up later. It also keeps cross-functional teams aligned.
9. Compliance/Legal Advisor
This is especially critical in regulated sectors like fintech, healthtech, or anything involving user data. Waiting too long to get legal and compliance advice can result in technical rework, regulatory delays, or worse — penalties.
This doesn't need to be a full-time hire early on. But having someone on retainer who understands your space can de-risk future launches and investor due diligence.
10. Content/Documentation Specialist
Content is often seen as a growth function, but early documentation - onboarding guides, internal SOPs, product notes, and public help docs - sets the tone for scalability.
Startups with strong documentation reduce onboarding time (for employees and users), get fewer support tickets, and enable async collaboration. This role can start part-time or as a hybrid content/marketing hire.
