Purpose
The Engineering Team Lead provides technical leadership and strategic direction for the engineering squad, ensuring that the team delivers high-quality, scalable, and maintainable software solutions aligned with business objectives. The role owns architectural decision-making, sets and upholds engineering standards, and is the primary technical escalation point for the squad.
The Engineering Team Lead operates at the intersection of technical delivery and people leadership — mentoring and coaching Software Engineers, driving a culture of engineering excellence, and ensuring the team has the practices, processes, and tooling to deliver reliably. The role works closely with the Product Owner to define technical scope and manage delivery risk.
This role carries accountability for the overall engineering health of the squad: code quality, technical debt posture, CI/CD pipeline health, and the team's readiness to adopt new technologies and practices in response to changing business needs.
Responsibilities
- Provide strong technical leadership and strategic direction for the engineering team, ensuring alignment between technical implementation and business goals.
- Design and own high-level architecture decisions, system design, and technical roadmaps while ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability of solutions.
- Lead and facilitate technical discussions, design reviews, and architecture decision records (ADRs) to drive consensus and high-quality outcomes.
- Discuss architectural approach with peer Engineering Team Leads across the different platforms for services that cross the platform boundaries and propose / adopt solutions.
- Mentor and coach Software Engineers, conduct regular one-on-one sessions, and support their technical growth, career development, and knowledge sharing.
- Foster a culture of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and psychological safety within the team.
- Take ownership of overall code quality, technical standards, and best practices across the team, actively promoting clean code, test-driven development, and engineering excellence.
- Oversee and improve the team's development processes, including GitHub workflows, branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release management.
- Conduct thorough code reviews with a focus on architecture, performance, security, and long-term maintainability, while mentoring others on review practices.
- Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Engineering Managers, and other stakeholders to define technical scope, estimate effort, identify risks, and ensure realistic delivery timelines.
- Act as a primary point of escalation for complex technical issues and production incidents, guiding the team toward timely and effective resolutions.
- Champion continuous improvement initiatives, including technical debt reduction, automation opportunities, and adoption of new tools and practices.
- Represent the engineering team in cross-functional meetings and contribute to technology evaluations, tool selection, and platform strategy.
- Stay at the forefront of industry trends and emerging technologies relevant to the team's domain and drive their appropriate adoption.
Decisions
In this role I take decisions on:
- Architectural approach and system design choices for the squad's platform
- Architectural decision making with peer leads to agree approach for solutions that cross platform boundaries
- Engineering standards, coding practices, and technical tooling adopted by the team
- Technical scope, effort estimates, and risk identification for backlog items and roadmap delivery
- Escalation response approach for complex technical issues and production incidents
- Prioritisation of technical debt, automation, and continuous improvement work
- Director of Engineering — on architectural direction, cross-platform standards, and significant technology decisions
- Product Owner — on technical scope, delivery timelines, and trade-offs between features and technical health
- Scrum Master — on sprint delivery flow and removal of technical impediments
- Fellow Engineering Team Leads — on cross-platform consistency and shared engineering standards via the Engineering CoE
- Software Engineers — on implementation approach, code standards, and team ways of working
Recurring tasks
In this role I take care of:
- Daily stand-up participation and facilitation
- Architecture Decision Record (ADR) creation and maintenance
- Code review of pull requests (ongoing)
- One-to-one sessions with Software Engineers (at least fortnightly)
- Sprint planning technical input and effort estimation
- Sprint review participation and demo oversight
- Sprint retrospective participation
- Engineering process and tooling review (ongoing)
- Technical debt identification and backlog contribution
- Contribution to Engineering CoE / community of practice
Key Relationships
- Director of Engineering (technical direction and line management)
- Software Engineers (direct or dotted-line reports)
- Product Owner (technical scope, delivery planning, and trade-offs)
- Scrum Master (sprint delivery flow and impediment removal)
- Other Engineering Team Leads (Engineering CoE and cross-platform standards)
- Director of Data / Director of Security & IT (where cross-platform technical dependencies exist)
- Platform vendors and technology partners (technology evaluation and integration)
- Third-party engineering contractors or consultants (where applicable)
Approach to decision-making
My approach to decision-making is grounded in technical rigour, team ownership, and long-term maintainability. For architectural and standards decisions, I favour approaches that are scalable, secure, and maintainable over those that optimise for short-term delivery speed at the cost of technical health.
For decisions with cross-platform or architectural impact, I consult with the Director of Engineering and other Engineering Team Leads, and document significant decisions as Architecture Decision Records so that context and rationale are available to the team over time.
For delivery decisions, I work collaboratively with the Product Owner to define realistic scope and surface technical risks early, ensuring that commitments are grounded in genuine capacity and technical feasibility. When production incidents or complex escalations arise, I act decisively to guide the team toward resolution while maintaining clear communication with stakeholders.