[LucaMo]

> We had 4 backend developers and a DevOps guy who was already stretched thin.

The mistake here was having an architect full stop. The team is too small, a good tech lead can manage to plan a service with 50k MAU (and way beyond) without an architect. The problem with some companies that get millions in seed funding is that they need to spend the money and they do so by adding roles that shouldn't exist at that stage.

[sshine]

> and a DevOps guy who was already stretched thin

Another favourite antipattern: making devops a bottleneck. Don’t over-engineer production, don’t buy abstraction you can’t afford, and educate your colleagues to lower the bus factor.

Dedicated devops that aren’t co-founders are notorious for cv optimizing: working with cool, but time-consuming stuff they don’t yet master, at the cost of delivery-time risk.