A full stack engineer is an all-rounder player who can at once handle front-end and back-end. They can take a project from inception to deployment. Instead of hiring different specialists for different tasks, a full stack engineer can be employed to handle the responsibilities of multiple people. As they understand the business as well as the technical side of things, they work well in leadership roles. To hire qualified candidates for the position of full stack engineer, evaluate them with technical assessments that tests them on specific skills.

Who is a full stack engineer?

A full stack engineer is a developer who can do it all – front-end and back-end alike – and know their way around servers, databases and more. They come with a breadth of experience and are capable of building applications on all platforms – web, mobile and desktop. These multi-skilled developers are good team players having an end-to-end grasp of software development.

 A full stack engineer is the one-point contact that drives the development process right from ideation to deployment and beyond. They work on the overall architecture of the product development cycle and ensure that these solutions are scalable. They truly are the “Jack of all trades”. No wonder they are among the top 10 job roles with most demand overall.

Why hire a full stack engineer?

Full stack engineers are one of the most resourceful employees in a software development company. Because of their familiarity with the end-to-end development cycle of a software product, they are basically the project owners. A one-man-army, a full stack engineer is someone who is hired to find solutions to any problem related to software development. Since they have such a wide scope in terms of job responsibility, the number of people that are needed to be hired are cut down helping make the team small and agile.

Besides, they are the best people to assume leadership from inception to deployment. And since they work across the stack, they can build highly scalable solutions with good user experiences and measurable business growth.

When to hire a full stack engineer?

Full stack engineers are hired depending on the requirements of a role. Following are a few instances when hiring them is helpful:

• When building an MVP: In companies where the operations are lean and they need to validate an idea or concept, they will resort to building a minimum viable product (MVP). In this circumstance, having a full stack engineer on the team is beneficial. They are capable of taking an idea and turning it into fully-functional prototype.
• When assigning a product manager: Full stack engineers make great product managers as they understand both the engineering and the business side of things. They can be one of the best people to take decisions when all parameters have to be kept in mind proving them to be a very valuable resource.
• When budgets are constrained: In cases where hiring specialists is not viable, full stack developers are the best hires. So instead of hiring for back-end, front-end and network engineer separately, it is more economical to hire a full stack engineer.
• When looking for a CTO or co-founder: When a person has a good idea for a product and is looking for a person to build it, full stack engineer is the one to hire. They can be one half of a symbiotic business relationship where they can use their technical expertise to build products.

Skills of a full stack engineer

Full stack engineers have a tall order when it comes to skills. They need to have knowledge and skills across all layers.

The following are the most important in terms of skills:

How to hire a full stack engineer?

• Screen: Screening for a full stack engineer or rather any technical role can be tricky as the resume doesn’t do full justice to the actual skills of the candidates. So this step needs to be carried out carefully. But as much as possible, look for candidates with relevant experience and skills.
• Assess: This is the most important step in hiring for any technical role. Test the candidates on the relevant skills with technical assessments. It may not always be possible to create assessments from scratch.

Use Role-Based Assessments customised according to your requirements by Yaksha.

Show me how >>

• Interview: Once you have shortlisted qualified candidates based on technical assessments, it’s time to evaluate them on their other abilities like leadership, capacity to dealing with uncertainty, and passion for learning.