A guide for Sourcegraph engineers

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Successful engineers at Sourcegraph

Managing high-performing engineering teams at Sourcegraph

What’s a Tech Lead?

Although we expect all engineers to be high agency and own projects end-to-end, a Tech Lead has additional responsibilities.

As Tech Lead (TL), you take on a set of duties above and beyond that of other team members. You are the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) whose responsibility is making sure the team has a strong technical culture and delivers projects successfully.

Related roles are:

• Individual contributors: Works with TL to ensure work is coordinated. Still shows high agency and ownership.
• Project Lead: Similar responsibilities, but scoped to a single project.
• Engineering Manager (EM): Handles people management. May act as the Tech Lead when there is not an IC in that role.

Team-level responsibilities include:

• Create an engineering vision: You set the engineering vision and scope of the team.
• Share team progress: You make sure that others in the company know what’s going on with your team, both for releases and general status updates.
• Lead by example: You set a high standard for quality and work ethic. You help other engineers on the team to do their work through planning and scoping, reviewing contributions, suggesting improvements, and being an accountability partner.

Project-level responsibilities include:

• Set project scope: Define the vision and scope of a project. You make sure everyone is aligned (consent, not consensus). You gather input from from partner teams as early as possible. Product and Design are common. Also consider Security, Cloud Ops, and Technical Success.
• Plan and track: You define a plan for delivering a project. You ensure that the correct tradeoffs are made in terms of scope, resources, and delivery time. You ensures that individual work comes together. You keep track of the progress of the project.
• Gather input: To build a lovable product, you gather feedback internally and externally. You find ways to do this efficiently so you can iterate quickly. Feedback is not just relevant to the final product. It also applies to design, requirements, and code.
• Communicate: You communicate progress of the project to stakeholders, EMs, VP of Engineering as much as needed and as clearly as possible.