Mission

Ultimately responsible for shipping code and building the product right.

Responsibilities

Lead. Leads by inspiring and setting the bar for code quality for the engineering team, and cracking the hard problems.
- Guide the approach and execution.
- Guide people in making the right technical decisions themselves over imposing them.
- Be aware of the current technical landscape and knows where the wind blows.
Nurture community contributions. You will provide guidance and direction to unlock the contributions of the community. Your time will often be way better spent doing this than fixing the problems yourself.
Enable quality work. The Tech lead:
- Embody and foster the engineering culture, e.g. rigorousness, push for small single-purpose PRs, encourage peer reviews, create strong feedback loops between decision and outcome.
- Empower the team to aim for high-quality outputs. By doing such it aims for the success of delivered solutions.
- Push for consistency, follow what's going on in the other teams.
Keep technical debt in check. Make sure we can keep shipping features at a reasonable pace.
- Align the team on "one way" of doing things and make sure engineers follow the conventions.
A solver. Digs deep into arbitrarily complex problems and finds an appropriate path forward. Some focus on a given area for long periods, while others bounce from hotspot to hotspot as guided by organizational leadership.
Shape the product. Be laser-focused on the end goal. It's not about solving technical challenges but about the problem solved for the users.

This sub-track involves aligning a larger group of people under a common structure.

Lead. Lead by building consensus, particularly in the face of competing design requirements.
- Is an excellent communicator to brings disjoint ideas together.
Architecture. Is responsible for the direction, quality, and approach within a critical area, both today and stretching into the multi-year future horizon. They combine a deep knowledge of technical constraints, user needs, and organization-level leadership.
- Set implementation direction. ****The tech lead provides architectural and design direction.
- Translates ideas that a product manager wants into ideas that can be implemented.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13088404

In the teams without a tech lead that I have seen, people just defer to the most senior/confident developer in the team to resolve deadlocks and decide between some tougher choices. That person essentially becomes a tech lead without a title. […] However, these teams also tended to be most consensus-driven.

This role helps the team have a faster pace of learning.