We have the budget for one senior hire or two juniors. Which do we do?

Option A is the stronger choice because it resolves the immediate capacity and ownership gap: a senior hire can take responsibility for the area from the first month and does not require a small team to absorb two simultaneous training loads. The junior option has real advantages—more hands on already queued work, lower cost, and a longer-term pipeline—but those benefits depend on the existing team having enough mentoring bandwidth. If two juniors must ramp up while the team is already too small to train them well, the likely outcome is slower throughput, quality risk, and no one truly owning the area in year one. The phrase 'own the area' also implies leadership and judgment that juniors are unlikely to provide immediately. Therefore, unless the queued work is unusually simple, high-volume, and junior-friendly and strong mentoring capacity is clearly available, the senior hire is the lower-risk, higher-certainty decision; it also creates the mentoring foundation that could make future junior hires viable.