Tech Lead

Purpose of the role

Tech Leads are responsible for leading their team: ensuring engineers have clear goals, the support they need to do their best work, and the opportunity to grow. They deliver through their team rather than as individuals and are accountable for both the team's output and the wellbeing of the people in it.

About the role

Being a Tech Lead is one of the most consequential roles in engineering. Every employee deserves a great manager: someone who knows them well, develops them deliberately, is honest with them, and genuinely cares about their success. Done well, the role has an outsized positive effect on the people in it. Done poorly, the damage can be lasting.

The role requires a mix of capabilities: team leadership, people management, technical grounding, stakeholder communication, and delivery. The balance shifts depending on the team and the moment, but none of these can be set aside entirely.

Tech Leads at Redgate lead product teams, internal systems teams, data teams and innovation teams. The role applies equally across all of them. What stays constant is the expectation to lead well, develop your people, and deliver.

Competencies

Team Leadership

The shift from contributing to a team to being responsible for how the team functions: from setting clear goals to actively shaping team culture and ways of working.

Makes Goals Clear and Builds Consensus: Leads the team by making goals clear and getting consensus on them. Works through disagreement to a decision the team will commit to, and can point to a specific instance of doing so.
Promotes Continuous Improvement: Embeds a habit of reflection and improvement in how the team works, ensuring retrospectives and reviews lead to concrete changes that are followed through.
Creates Psychological Safety: Consistently invites challenge and debate in team settings, responds constructively and without defensiveness, and follows up when someone raises a concern so they see it was taken seriously.
Delegates to Develop and Deliver: Delegates tasks and responsibilities to ensure required work gets done and team members gain skills and experience. Weighs the needs of the work against the needs of the person and can give a recent example where the development need won.
Ensures Transparency: Ensures the team's work, decisions and blockers are visible outside the team without anyone having to ask. The team, not only the TL, keeps that information current.
Seeks Support and Guidance: Works independently, reaching out for support, whether that's their GEM, PLT, GLT, the people team, coaches, or other TLs, when a problem genuinely needs it, rather than by default.

People Management

Managing, developing, and growing the individuals in the team: from understanding each person well to delivering honest feedback and creating meaningful development opportunities.

Knows Their People Well and Adapts to Them: Makes a consistent effort to understand each team member through regular 1:1s and honest conversation. Can speak to each person's strengths, weaknesses and aspirations with specific, current examples. Directs, guides, supports or coaches depending on the person and the task and can explain why a given person gets a given approach.
Gives Honest and Constructive Feedback: Has open and honest discussions about performance, including difficult conversations. Delivers feedback with care and clarity, and adapts their approach based on how it's landed before.
Assesses and Manages Performance: Maintains a clear and current view of each team member's performance. Identifies when someone is underperforming, addresses it directly and in good time. Keeps a simple record of important conversations and agreed actions, so nothing gets lost between check-ins and progress stays visible to both people.
Actively Develops Team Members: Actively creates development opportunities for team members, tailored to what each person needs to grow. Follows up to check opportunities were useful and adjusts the approach if they weren't.
Builds Progression Plans and Promotion Cases: Facilitates the creation of progression plans that give each team member a clear, current view of what they're working towards. When someone is ready, builds an objective, evidence-based case for promotion or salary review, drawing on examples gathered against the relevant competency framework.

Technical Contribution

Staying grounded enough in the team's technical work to give useful direction and make sound decisions, without becoming a delivery dependency or returning to a full IC role.

Engages with the Team's Technical Work: Actively engages with the team's technical work: reviewing designs, taking part in technical discussions, and asking questions that surface risk. Chooses where to go deep including writing code themselves when that's the most effective way to unblock the team or stay technically credible, and where to trust the team and can explain that choice.
Drives Resolution of Technical Problems: Surfaces technical problems and improvement opportunities, and ensures they get addressed, whether by investigating themselves or by backing engineers to own the investigation and fix.
Establishes and Adjusts Technical Structure: Puts in place the processes and structures the team needs to tackle their goals and changes them when they stop working. Can point to specific structures they've introduced or removed and why.
Balances Leading and Building: Keeps enough hands-on involvement to stay technically credible without becoming a delivery dependency. The team is not blocked waiting on the TL's own code.

Communication and Stakeholder Management

Representing the team clearly and credibly: upwards to the PLT/GLT, laterally across functions, and outwards to customers. Ensuring information flows well in both directions.

Represents the Team: Represents the team's work and priorities to relevant stakeholders beyond the team, whether directly or via their GEM, and brings relevant context and decisions back to the team so they understand how their work connects to the bigger picture.
Challenges and Influences Senior Decisions: Makes a reasoned case directly to decision-makers when the team's interests or judgement are being overlooked: sets out the impact, proposes an alternative where there is one, and follows it through to a conclusion they can take back to the team.
Partners with the Business: Proactively builds relationships across the business, brings technical context into conversations, and raises opportunities where the team's work could create wider value.
Communicates Clearly Across Contexts: Communicates clearly with the range of people they deal with across the business, typically their own team, leadership forums, and non-technical stakeholders. Adjusts level of detail and framing for each.

Emotional Intelligence

Caring effectively for the people in the team and modelling the behaviours that support a healthy, high-performing team culture.

Cares for Their People's Wellbeing: Cares for their people; is primarily concerned with their people's well-being and is considerate of their feelings and needs. Detects and responds to the needs of their team and its members. Ensures team members have a good work-life balance and are taking enough holiday.
Maintains and Improves Morale: Works actively to maintain and improve morale in the team. Can point to specific things they have done and what changed as a result.
Models Composure and Resilience: Maintains composure during challenges. Recognises and manages their own emotions, and moves the team to a plan quickly. Builds trust across the organisation by being predictable under pressure.
Guides the Team on Emotional Intelligence: Guides the team in developing emotional intelligence. Leads by example, discusses its importance in technical roles, and addresses it directly when someone handles a disagreement badly.

Delivery

Ensuring the team reliably delivers its goals: from planning and risk management to removing blockers and managing distractions.

Identifies and Manages Delivery Risk: Identifies risks to delivery early, whether technical, resourcing, or dependency-related, and takes action to reduce or mitigate them before they materialise. Can point to specific risks they've spotted and what they did about it.
Manages Delivery Expectations: Communicates the team's delivery plans and progress clearly and honestly to stakeholders, flagging changes as soon as they're known rather than waiting until a deadline is missed.
Manages Team Deliverables Effectively: Effectively manages deliverables for the team, ensuring the prioritised work is planned, broken into incremental slices that deliver value early, and aligned with team/group goals, not tracked as isolated output.
Removes Distractions and Low-Value Work: Actively removes distractions and low-impact work. Can point to specific requests they declined or deferred and the reasoning and protects the team's focus without the requester feeling dismissed.
Drives Delivery Pace: Actively drives the pace at which the team delivers against its goals: running experiments, removing bottlenecks, and using data to know whether changes are working. Can point to specific interventions and their effect.

Business Knowledge

Understanding the team's domain, its stakeholders, and the broader organisational context well enough to make sound prioritisation decisions and connect the team's work to real-world value.

Knows Their Domain: Has a deep knowledge of the team's area of focus and the context in which it operates: the adjacent teams and systems it depends on, the commercial or operational drivers behind it, and how it fits Redgate's wider picture. Can explain a recent prioritisation decision in those terms.
Engages with Stakeholders and End Users: Engages directly with the people who use and are affected by the team's work and creates opportunities for engineers to do the same. Brings insight back to the team and can point to specific examples of feedback that changed what the team built or how.
Builds Cross-Functional Relationships: Develops good working relationships with the functions and teams that contribute to the team's success. Understands what each is trying to achieve and what constrains them, and works issues out directly with them rather than escalating.
Stays Current with Industry Developments: Keeps abreast of technical developments in the industry that may be of interest to Redgate. Collaborates and coordinates with other development teams at Redgate for mutual benefit.