I've thought a lot about this. I am posting this in an attempt to give an example of what's worked for 1 company, not as a "guide" or "best practices". I post this in an attempt to give people ideas on what may work for them.
I operate an engineering team as a seed stage startup across 2 coasts of the US, multiple parts of APAC, and europe.
We are around 13 full time with a few part timers. We started as 2 people. Our first hire was co located with us. Our next one was remote.
From there we've made our hires only through referrals or our open source channel.
We did YC W16 this year as ~6 people and most of us remote.
We've more than doubled the team after having raised nearly 3 million.
A few notes on what's worked for us:
Remote first office, no one (even if there is an office in your area) is required to come in (at all). We use https://gitter.im/ to interact with our open source community, partner companies, and team members.
Half of our hiring happens on gitter as well.
Some of us choose to for a separation of work and home.
We don't have job postings either. We do this on purpose. We tell engineers the same thing: Show up in our open source channel. This offends some people, but has worked for us.
I won't claim this scales long term, but there have been fairly large companies (~800+) that have scaled this way just fine.
We've found productivity to be quite high overall. A lot less noise and very efficient communication.
Part of it is self management. The hires we make tend to have that part down pretty well. I've learned to spot bottlenecks. Part of that is just by keeping an eye on a lot of channels. Proactive reaching out if there are problems helps a lot. Periodic check ins are a must.
We do a weekly google hangout across 5 time zones that amounts to being a standup.
For scoping engineering work, we tend to have longer projects people are working on, usually a minimum of a week. This leads to less context switching.
Happy to answer questions or expand on anything that sounds interesting.