There are really great engineers, and if you find one, you should try to keep them around.
They have these traits:
But they definitely have a setup that lets them work well with the rest of the team.
They know this is important because it helps communicate expectations to the rest of the team. And CI keeps things in check.
They probably even have some kind of package manager in use to enable reproducible builds (see #1).
And train the rest of the team to become great engineers too!
With this definition ALMOST ANYONE who is WILLING TO LEARN can become a great engineer.
This is much more important than getting the project done as fast as possible just to meet some VC requirements.