What is The Tech Lead Role?

What is The Tech Lead Role?

October 11, 2022 · 3 min
Photo by Kaleidico

When you have strong engineers in your team that you see have a great potential to not just do great work but to also improve the way the whole team works, it is the right time to introduce them to the tech lead role. Here is a description of a tech lead role that I have used with my teams.

Purpose

The aim of this post is to share a clear understanding of the technical lead role within the Engineering Teams. It is meant to provide guidance for people just getting started as technical leads, support for existing leads, as well as insights for people interested in transitioning towards such a role in the future.

Introduction

The Technical Lead is the primary responsible person for all the engineering concerns of a team. They own the architecture and design of the systems that the team owns, control the operational aspects of these systems, and handle their long term technical direction and health.

The technical lead role is a formal leadership role within an engineering team. Aside from individual contributor responsibilities, the technical lead is primarily responsible for leading the business domain / subsystem from a technical perspective and for providing technical guidance to members of the team.

This role is specific to 1 person in the team. The Tech Lead is a partner to the Engineering Manager and Product Manager and other top-level stakeholders of the team in order to make the project and the team successful.

High-level responsibilities

Day to day activities

Let me know if this was useful for you and what would you add to this description.