A founding engineer at Arize shares their journey and insights on what it takes to be effective in this role, which requires wearing multiple hats such as technical individual contributor, customer support, product management, project management, recruiting, and content marketing. The author, Manisha Sharma, joined Arize after having experience in frontend engineering and senior frontend engineering at Pandora and Slack, respectively, and found that the startup environment aligned closely with her engineering goals. She identifies seven essential elements of effective founding engineers, including humility to admit what they don't know, summoning grace amid chaos, taking ownership, thriving under ambiguity, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, making tradeoffs wisely, and trusting their fellow founders.