12 Tips for Scaling Your Engineering Team

The exact playbook I've used to build 100+ successful engineering orgs.

Author

Chris Reynolds
February 18, 2026

Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

I've been building engineering teams for 20+ years, and I've seen the same pattern more times than I can remember.

Founders hit product-market fit and start hiring. Suddenly, their once-nimble team feels like it's moving through mud.

They bring me in to diagnose what's wrong, and more often than not, the answer is the same: they're trying to scale using the structure that got them to 10 engineers—and wondering why it stops working at 50.

There's a clear framework to scaling engineering teams that works regardless of your growth rate or industry. It comes down to understanding 3 critical team structures and knowing when to transition between them.

I shared a 12-part series on LinkedIn breaking down this entire playbook a while back, and I wanted to put it all into one place to make it easier to reference.

So here are all 12 tips for scaling your engineering team, with links to the full breakdown of each one.

📒 DEEP DIVE

12 Tips for Scaling Your Engineering Team

Lessons from building 100+ engineering teams at 2-person startups to 1000+ person enterprises.

Tip 1: Understand the 3 Critical Team Sizes

Success isn't about fancy frameworks or copying what unicorns do. It's about understanding the 3 stages of engineering team development:

  1. Elite Teams (2-4 engineers)

  2. Core Units (6-8 engineers)

  3. Orchestration (4-6 teams)

I've used this exact pattern to build over 100 successful engineering orgs, from 2-person startups to 1000+ person companies.

Tip 2: Master Elite Teams Before You Scale Past Them

Elite Teams are your most powerful engineering tool—and the most dangerous to scale. This is 2-4 engineers who share the same brain, ship like lightning, and run on shared context instead of process.

But here's what most founders miss: these teams run on individual heroics. They're built for innovation, not scale. Try to run your entire company this way, and you'll burn out your best people.

Tip 3: Know When to Transition to Core Units

Core Units are where predictable execution begins. 6-8 engineers with different specialties, working as one.

This isn't for early startups, though. Think 20-100 employees, $1M-$10M+ ARR, and proven PMF.

The power comes from the perfect mix: frontend developers, backend architects, platform specialists, and data engineers. But it takes time for Core Units to gel. They build a shared language for tackling everything from customer features to core infrastructure.

Tip 4: Transition from Elite Teams to Core Units Deliberately

Moving from Elite Teams into Core Units is like changing engines mid-flight—scary, but necessary if you want to keep flying.

You'll know it's time when features take longer to ship, technical debt is mounting, and velocity slows despite your best people working harder.

Start with your engineering heroes and create Staff Engineer roles. From there, build specialized roles with clear guidelines. Whatever you do, don't overcorrect—give guardrails, not handcuffs.

Tip 5: Give Frontend Engineers the Infrastructure to Succeed

Frontend developers are your bridge between technical excellence and user experience. But most companies add them to Core Units without giving them what they need to thrive. 

The best frontend developers need clear direction, the right tools, quality by default with automated checks on every PR, and a smooth process flow. 

Tip 6: Build the Foundation Your Backend Engineers Need

Backend engineers are your foundation builders, making sure everything actually works when you scale. But most companies waste their potential.

They need solid architectural foundations, local dev environments that just work, quality and reliability tools, and self-service documentation.

Tip 7: Let Platform Engineers Build the Highways

Platform engineers are the highways and bridges for your engineering org. Without the right setup, they get stuck managing infrastructure, fighting security bottlenecks, and drowning in support tickets.

They empower everyone else, so your entire Core Unit depends on getting this right.

Tip 8: Stop Making Data Engineers Run Queries

If your data engineers are spending their time running queries for the team, that's a recipe for disaster.

They need solid data architecture, real quality and governance woven into every step of the data journey, simple and reliable pipelines, and self-service analytics that empower teams to find their own answers.

Tip 9: Don't Overcomplicate Orchestration

Orchestration is where most engineering orgs break because they overcomplicate it.

This is manager of managers territory—where your engineering leaders are shaping your company's future in the boardroom and teaching first-time managers how to lead engineers.

That's why they need to be masters of the craft who deeply understand how engineering departments work.

Tip 10: Keep Your Organization Flat

The secret to scaling engineering beyond orchestration? Keeping it flat.

The further your engineers get from customer problems, the harder it is to build the right solutions. That's why for 99% of companies—I'm talking up to 100s of millions of dollars in revenue—flat wins.

Tip 11: Scale to Orchestration When Strategy Matters More Than Code

Core Units are shipping and the team's growing, but you feel like you're lacking strategic direction and leadership. That's your signal to start Orchestration.

You want to turn your engineering department into an operating system: level up your technical foundation, bring in solutions architects who speak product and engineering fluently, and build concrete systems for standards and governance.

Tip 12: Remember the Formula

Elite Teams (2-4 engineers) are your lightning-fast innovators—perfect for early-stage startups, running on shared context instead of process.

Core Units (6-8 engineers) drive consistent execution with the right mix of specialists, built for sustained growth.

Orchestration (4-6 teams) keeps it all moving in manager of managers territory, turning great engineers into leaders.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Scaling engineering teams comes down to understanding which structure matches your current stage and executing the transition cleanly.

Most companies either move too fast—throwing process at everything until their best engineers quit—or too slow, holding onto Elite Team structure until systems collapse.

The companies that get it right understand one thing: each stage builds on the last.

They build the right structure for where you are today, and prepare for where they're going tomorrow.

This is the formula I've used to build over 100 successful engineering orgs.

Now, it's up to you to build yours.

Talk soon,

Chris.