The First 90 Days as a Founding Engineer

Joining a startup as a Founding Engineer is very different from being a Senior Engineer at a scale-up. At Suno Analytics, my first 90 days were a crash course in prioritization. Although the company ultimately sunsetted in early 2026, the lessons I learned in that compressed timeframe were invaluable.

1. Perfect is the Enemy of Shipped

In big tech, you might spend weeks refining a scalable architecture for a feature. In a seed-stage startup, if you haven’t shipped it in 3 days, it might be too late. I had to learn to write “delete-able code”—code that works well enough for now but is modular enough to be ripped out later.

2. You are the Product Manager

There are no detailed specs. There is a problem statement: “Users are confused about the pricing.” It’s your job to figure out the UI, the flow, the copy, AND the code. This is where my design background was a superpower.

3. Tool Selection Matters

We chose a boring stack: React, Node, Postgres. Why? because we can hire for it easily, and the ecosystem has a library for everything. Innovation points don’t pay the bills; product-market fit does.