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 technical face of the team whose responsibility is making sure the team has a strong technical culture, makes good technical decisions, and helps team members deliver successfully.

Related roles are:

• Individual contributors: Works with TL to ensure work is coordinated. Still shows high agency and ownership.
• Project Lead / DRI: The Directly Responsible Individual for a specific project. Owns project delivery, scope, and communication. The TL is not by default the DRI for team projects.
• 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 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.
• Be the technical face of the team: You show up in feedback channels, answer questions about the team's domain, and ensure feedback is being responded to by someone on the team.

Project-level responsibilities include:

• Have opinions on team projects: You have a point of view on which projects the team should tackle and what those projects should look like. When roadmap projects are well-defined, you work with your EM to balance support work with roadmap work.
• Help project DRIs deliver: You help project DRIs set scope, plan, and track their projects. You provide technical guidance and help unblock them. Delivery responsibility belongs to the project DRI, not the TL by default.
• Gather input: You help project DRIs gather feedback internally and externally, look for gaps in feedback coverage, and review technical feedback to assess its impact on scope and approach.