How OnHires helped Layer2State build its founding product and engineering leadership team

Building a Web3 governance platform from the ground up means the earliest hires effectively define what the product becomes. Unlike a typical SaaS startup extending an existing category, Layer2State is constructing infrastructure for digital citizenship and decentralized governance, a category with few established playbooks and even fewer engineers with direct prior experience in it.

Layer2State needed a small founding team capable of covering product direction, core engineering, and applied AI simultaneously: a product owner to shape the platform roadmap, a principal fullstack engineer to build the core system, an AI engineer to support the platform's data and automation needs, and a combined CTO/PO to provide technical and product leadership across the whole effort.

Given the combined and overlapping scope of these roles, particularly the CTO/PO position spanning both technical and product leadership, OnHires needed to source candidates comfortable operating without the usual organizational boundaries of a larger company.

Hiring for a genuinely early-stage Web3 project means the candidate pool is inherently smaller than for mainstream tech roles, and it is further split between candidates purely chasing crypto-market hype and those with the founder-level judgment and technical depth Layer2State actually needed. Filtering for the latter, in a sector prone to short-lived projects and speculative positioning, added a layer of due diligence beyond standard technical screening.

The combined CTO/PO mandate was particularly difficult to fill, requiring someone credible enough to set technical direction while also owning product strategy, a profile far rarer than either a pure CTO or pure product leader. Similarly, the principal fullstack engineer needed genuine blockchain and distributed-systems fluency, not just general fullstack experience relabeled for a Web3 job posting.

Because Layer2State's mission touches governance and digital citizenship concepts that go beyond typical product requirements, candidates also needed genuine conviction in the underlying vision, since founding-stage roles at unconventional companies see high early attrition when that conviction isn't real.

OnHires calibrated each role around the specific demands of a founding-stage Web3 team, distinguishing clearly between the CTO/PO's combined leadership mandate and the more execution-focused principal fullstack and AI engineer roles, so sourcing could target the right seniority for each.

For the technical roles, OnHires prioritized candidates with verifiable blockchain, distributed-systems, or applied AI experience, screening out generalist candidates who lacked genuine domain depth. For the CTO/PO search specifically, evaluation focused on candidates who had previously operated across both technical and product ownership, rather than technical leaders looking to add product scope for the first time.

Structured interviews probed for genuine interest in the digital governance space alongside technical competence, helping surface candidates likely to stay committed through the uncertainty of an early-stage, category-defining product, with OnHires coordinating closely with Layer2State's founders throughout the search.

Layer2State completed 4 founding hires covering product, core engineering, AI, and combined technical/product leadership. One placement later moved on from the company, a normal outcome for an early-stage founding team and did not require a replacement search. The remaining hires now form the core team building out the platform's product and engineering direction.

With a CTO/PO providing combined leadership alongside a principal fullstack engineer and AI engineer, Layer2State has the founding capacity to move its digital nation platform from concept toward a functioning product.

Roles successfully filled:

Founding-stage hiring in an emerging category like Web3 governance means screening as much for conviction and adaptability as for technical skill, since the usual playbooks and comparable hires simply don't exist yet.

By calibrating each role around Layer2State's actual founding-stage needs and filtering for genuine domain depth over speculative interest, OnHires helped build a small team capable of carrying an ambitious, category-defining product forward.