I'm surprised they are still 3 engineers. They have been posting jobs for almost a year now and still haven't hired anyone, yet they keep saying in blogs and the job section they want to hire. I understanding waiting for the "best" yet at the same time you're growing a custom stack that requires specific skill sets and I imagine as time goes on it only gets harder. I mean, slow hiring is good too but at some point you need to give in and grow so that your employees can join in on your projects and grow with the company!
I think the problem is that if a startup hires a poor performing engineer, they get a negative output because other engineers will have to constantly fix/tune the offending code. So I definitely see backtype's cautious view of hiring only great engineers.
