Hiring to Build Real-Time Features: The Complete Guide

What Success Looks Like

Before diving into hiring, understand what successful real-time implementation actually means for your product. Real-time features have unique success criteria beyond just "it works."

Signs You Made the Right Hires

Technical Execution

• Messages deliver in under 100ms for 95% of users
• System handles connection drops and reconnections gracefully
• State synchronization works reliably across devices
• No message ordering issues or duplicate deliveries
• Scales predictably as concurrent users increase

Architecture Quality

• Clear separation between real-time transport and business logic
• Monitoring and observability built in from day one
• Fallback mechanisms for degraded connectivity
• Infrastructure costs scale linearly, not exponentially
• Easy to add new real-time features to existing infrastructure

User Experience

• Users perceive updates as "instant" (< 200ms perceived latency)
• Presence indicators (online/typing) feel accurate
• Optimistic updates make the interface feel responsive
• Connection issues surface helpful feedback, not silent failures
• Works reliably on mobile networks and variable connectivity

Red Flags in Implementation

Watch for these warning signs that indicate problems:

• Increasing latency as user count grows
• "Ghost" messages that appear then disappear
• Reconnection storms when server restarts
• Memory leaks in long-running connections
• State drift between connected clients
• High infrastructure costs relative to concurrent users

Technology Decisions: The Foundation

Your technology choice shapes your hiring needs. Make this decision before you start recruiting.

WebSockets vs Server-Sent Events vs Managed Services

When to Use Managed Services

Choose managed services (Pusher, Ably, Supabase Realtime) when:

1. Speed-to-market matters — You need chat or notifications in weeks, not months
2. Scale is moderate — Under 100K concurrent connections
3. Team is small — Don't have dedicated infrastructure engineers
4. Focus is elsewhere — Real-time is a feature, not your core product
5. Budget allows — $500-2000/month is acceptable for infrastructure

Real-world examples: SaaS notification systems, internal chat features, live dashboards for SMB products, MVPs testing real-time concepts.

Trade-offs:

• Vendor lock-in and pricing at scale
• Limited customization for edge cases
• Dependency on third-party availability
• May outgrow as you scale

When to Build Custom

Build custom WebSocket infrastructure when:

1. Real-time is your product — Chat apps, collaboration tools, gaming platforms
2. Scale requirements are high — Expecting millions of concurrent connections
3. Latency is critical — Need sub-50ms delivery for competitive advantage
4. Custom protocol needs — Standard pub/sub doesn't fit your use case
5. Cost optimization is essential — Managed service costs are prohibitive at scale

Real-world examples: Slack, Discord, Figma, multiplayer games, trading platforms, live video platforms.

Trade-offs:

• Significant engineering investment (3-6 months for production-ready)
• Operational complexity (monitoring, scaling, failover)
• Need specialized expertise
• Must handle edge cases yourself

Server-Sent Events: The Overlooked Option

Server-Sent Events (SSE) are underused but perfect for many scenarios:

Choose SSE when:

• Data flows server-to-client only (notifications, feeds, dashboards)
• You want simpler implementation than WebSockets
• HTTP/2 infrastructure is already in place
• Automatic reconnection handling is valuable

SSE advantages:

• Works over standard HTTP (better firewall compatibility)
• Automatic reconnection with last-event-ID
• Simpler server implementation
• No special load balancer configuration

SSE limitations:

• No client-to-server channel (use REST for that)
• Browser connection limits (6 per domain in HTTP/1.1)
• Less suitable for high-frequency bidirectional communication

Roles You'll Need

The roles you hire depend on your technology choice and scale requirements.

For Managed Service Approach

You need backend developers with event-driven experience, not real-time specialists.

Backend Developer with Real-Time Experience

Core responsibilities:

• Integrate managed real-time services (Pusher, Ably, Firebase)
• Design event architecture and channel structure
• Build server-side event publishing logic
• Handle client-side subscription and state management
• Optimize for cost and performance within service limits

Required skills:

• Strong backend development (Node.js, Python, Go, etc.)
• Event-driven architecture understanding
• API design and REST principles
• Basic understanding of WebSockets/pub-sub
• Experience with at least one managed real-time service

What to assess:

• Can they design a channel/room structure for your use case?
• Have they handled reconnection and state recovery?
• Do they understand event ordering and delivery guarantees?

For Custom WebSocket Implementation

You need experienced backend engineers with infrastructure knowledge.

Senior Backend Developer (Real-Time Focus)

Core responsibilities:

• Design and implement WebSocket server infrastructure
• Build connection management and session handling
• Implement pub/sub patterns and message routing
• Handle scaling, load balancing, and failover
• Create monitoring and debugging systems for real-time traffic

Required skills:

• Deep backend expertise (5+ years)
• WebSocket protocol understanding
• Event-driven and async programming patterns
• Distributed systems concepts (eventual consistency, CAP theorem)
• Experience with message queues (Redis Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, Kafka)
• Load balancing and horizontal scaling knowledge

What to assess:

• How would they handle 100K concurrent connections?
• What's their approach to connection state and sticky sessions?
• How do they debug message delivery issues?
• Experience with WebSocket at scale (not just tutorials)

For Collaborative Features (Google Docs-style)

This is the most specialized real-time domain.

Collaboration Engineer

Core responsibilities:

• Implement real-time synchronization for collaborative editing
• Design and build conflict resolution systems (CRDTs, OT)
• Handle presence, cursors, and selection sharing
• Optimize for latency-sensitive operations
• Build offline support with eventual sync

Required skills:

• Deep understanding of CRDTs or Operational Transformation
• Experience with collaborative software
• Strong algorithm and data structure background
• Client and server-side development
• Understanding of distributed consistency models

What to assess:

• Can they explain CRDTs vs OT and when to use each?
• Have they built collaborative features in production?
• How do they handle conflicting edits?
• Experience with offline-first architecture

Note: True collaboration engineers are rare and expensive. Consider using libraries like Yjs or Automerge before hiring for custom CRDT development.

Team Structure Options

Option 1: Feature Team (Most Common)

When to use: Real-time is a feature, not the core product

How it works: Backend engineers own real-time infrastructure. Frontend engineers integrate real-time into the UI. The team ships features end-to-end.

Option 2: Platform Team

When to use: Real-time is foundational infrastructure used by multiple product teams

How it works: Platform team provides real-time capabilities as internal service. Product teams consume the platform to build features. Centralizes expertise and reduces duplication.

Option 3: Embedded Specialist

When to use: Multiple teams need real-time, but not enough for full platform team

How it works: One experienced engineer provides guidance across teams. Teams own their implementations with specialist oversight. Good for scaling expertise without large dedicated team.

Hiring Sequence

For Managed Services Approach

Phase 1: Backend Foundation (Weeks 1-8)

Start with experienced backend developers:

• Can implement managed service integration
• Design event architecture
• Build initial features (notifications, basic chat)

Phase 2: Frontend Integration (Weeks 4-12)

Add frontend capability:

• Real-time UI components
• Optimistic updates
• Connection state management
• Mobile considerations

Phase 3: Scale Optimization (As Needed)

Add infrastructure expertise when:

• Costs are increasing faster than expected
• Performance issues emerge
• Considering migration from managed to custom

For Custom Implementation

Phase 1: Architect/Lead (Weeks 1-10)

Hire your most experienced real-time engineer first:

• Makes foundational architecture decisions
• Establishes patterns for connection handling
• Sets up monitoring and debugging infrastructure

Critical: This person's decisions will affect everything. Don't rush.

Phase 2: Backend Engineers (Weeks 6-16)

Build out the team:

• Implement features on established architecture
• Scale connection infrastructure
• Build specialized subsystems (presence, sync)

Phase 3: Frontend and DevOps (Weeks 10-20)

Complete the team:

• Frontend real-time integration
• DevOps for infrastructure scaling
• SRE for reliability and monitoring

Common Pitfalls

1. Over-Engineering Before You Need It

The mistake: Building custom WebSocket infrastructure for your 1,000-user product because "we might need it later."

What happens: 6 months of engineering time, complex infrastructure to maintain, and the product still has 1,000 users. You've built Slack's infrastructure for a feature that Pusher handles for $50/month.

Better approach: Start with managed services. Migration to custom is straightforward when you actually need it. Most companies never need custom WebSocket infrastructure.

2. Underestimating Connection Management

The mistake: Focusing on message delivery while ignoring connection lifecycle: reconnection, state recovery, authentication refresh, graceful degradation.

What happens: Users experience disconnections with no feedback, lose messages during network switches, have to refresh to recover state. The feature works in demos but fails in production.

Better approach: Connection management is half the work:

• Automatic reconnection with exponential backoff
• State recovery and message replay on reconnect
• Clear UI feedback for connection status
• Offline queueing for messages sent during disconnection
• Authentication token refresh without reconnection

3. Ignoring Mobile Network Reality

The mistake: Testing real-time on office WiFi and assuming it works everywhere.

What happens: Mobile users on 4G experience constant disconnections, high latency, and battery drain. What works on desktop fails on mobile.

Better approach: Test and design for mobile from the start:

• Aggressive reconnection strategies
• Batch messages to reduce connection frequency
• Implement proper background/foreground handling
• Consider battery impact of persistent connections
• Test on throttled networks and airplane mode recovery

4. Hiring Real-Time Specialists Too Early

The mistake: Hiring a "WebSocket engineer" before you've validated the product needs sophisticated real-time.

What happens: Expensive hire builds infrastructure you don't need. They get bored because your real-time needs are simple. They leave for a company with actual scale challenges.

Better approach: Start with generalist backend engineers who have event-driven experience. Managed services handle most cases. Hire specialists only when you've genuinely outgrown simpler approaches—typically 50K+ concurrent connections or complex collaboration requirements.

5. No Observability Strategy

The mistake: Building real-time features without proper monitoring, treating WebSocket connections as black boxes.

What happens: Debugging production issues becomes guesswork. You can't tell if messages are slow, dropped, or never sent. Performance problems are discovered by users, not monitoring.

Better approach: Build observability from day one:

• Connection metrics (count, duration, error rates)
• Message metrics (latency, delivery rate, ordering issues)
• Client-side telemetry (reconnection frequency, perceived latency)
• Distributed tracing through the real-time pipeline
• Alerting on anomalies before users complain

6. Premature Horizontal Scaling

The mistake: Designing for distributed WebSocket clusters before you need them.

What happens: Complexity explosion. Now you need sticky sessions, distributed pub/sub, state synchronization across nodes, and cluster coordination. Development slows to a crawl.

Better approach: Vertical scaling goes further than you think for WebSockets. A single well-optimized server can handle 100K+ connections. Design for horizontal scaling but implement vertical first. Add distribution only when single-node limits are actually reached.

Budget Planning

Team Costs (US Market, 2026)

Managed Services Approach

3-person team: $500K-630K/year total comp

Custom Implementation Approach

5-person team: $850K-1.15M/year total comp

*Total comp includes equity, benefits, and employer costs (~20-30% overhead)

Infrastructure Costs

Cost Optimization Strategies

Evaluate managed services carefully — Calculate TCO including engineering time. Pusher at $500/month is cheap compared to 1 engineer-month building custom infrastructure.

Consider hybrid approaches — Use managed services for most features, custom for specialized high-volume cases.

Optimize connection patterns — Batch messages, use efficient protocols, close idle connections. Architecture decisions affect infrastructure costs significantly.

Remote hiring — Real-time expertise is location-independent. Remote hiring can reduce costs 20-30% while accessing broader talent.