Hiring a first backend developer feels like the obvious next step for a growing product. Before you open the position, it is worth answering four questions honestly.
1. Is it a "build" problem or a "maintain and improve" problem?
They are two different kinds of work. Building something new needs sustained focus over months. Maintaining and improving an existing system is often a series of smaller jobs: fix a slow query, make deployments safer, clean up a fragile integration. The person you need depends on which one you actually have.
2. Who knows how the system gets deployed, and what happens if that person is unavailable for a week?
If the answer is "one person" or "nobody is sure", that is a risk worth fixing before anything else, whether or not you hire.
3. How much of the work is truly full-time, and how much is one- or two-month projects?
A full-time salary is a long commitment. If most of the work comes as projects with a clear start and end, a part-time senior person can be a better fit than a permanent hire.
4. Is the infrastructure documented, or does it live in one person's head?
Servers, deployments, monitoring, access: if none of it is written down, your team depends on memory. Documentation is cheap compared with the cost of rebuilding knowledge after someone leaves.
What this often turns out to mean
In many small companies the real need is not a whole team. It is one experienced person who understands both the code and the infrastructure, and who works part-time.
After 17 years in software development, I keep seeing this pattern. If you recognize your company in these questions, I am happy to talk it through. What would you ask?