Tech Lead sub-area · Engineering Manager
How a Tech Lead works with the responsibilities of a Manager
A Tech Lead may not own performance reviews, but must still create clarity, healthy execution, and space for engineers to grow.
Responsibilities
What the Tech Lead needs to own.
- Define outcomes, ownership boundaries, milestones, and escalation paths before execution begins.
- Match work to engineer growth goals while keeping delivery commitments realistic.
- Create feedback loops through one-to-ones, design reviews, retrospectives, and incident learning.
- Protect focus, surface risks early, and communicate progress honestly to product and leadership partners.
Strong signals
What good looks like.
- Measures leadership by team outcomes rather than personal output.
- Delegates meaningful ownership instead of only delegating tasks.
- Balances urgency with sustainable engineering practices and psychological safety.
Evidence from Sanjay's work
Principles backed by delivery.
Built the India Clinical Reporting team and led a scope spanning 10+ engineers.
Improved delivery by 100% over 10 months through execution improvements and AI adoption.
Created an on-call process and coached engineers through production incident response.
