WHAT DOES AN ENGINEERING TEAM LEAD DO?
Updated: Jun 11, 2025 - The Engineering Team Lead sets the direction for the development and QA teams, ensuring alignment with company objectives and fostering a culture of technical excellence. This position mentors junior and mid-level engineers, removes blockers and collaborates with management to create a rewarding work environment. The team lead also drives the development of scalable, high-performance solutions, contributes clean code, and works closely with product teams throughout the project lifecycle.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Engineering Team Lead
1. Engineering Team Lead Accountabilities
- Leadership: Manage a team of engineers from all disciplines that form a team
- Talent Management: Be responsible for hiring, development, performance management, and professional development of direct reports
- Collaboration: Be an active member of the team, developing features or performing QA depending on focus.
- Communication: Perform frequent one-on-ones with each of the direct reports
- Product Management: Work closely with a product owner to ensure the team backlog is refined and prioritized
- Technical Leadership: Provide technical oversight, guidance, and mentorship to the team
- Career Coaching: Provide career development coaching
- Development Process: Participate in all parts of the development process
- Feedback: Provide regular, direct feedback to reports
- Problem Solving: Work with support from the Engineering leadership to escalate issues and remove roadblocks that affect team productivity
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Interact with individuals and teams across the company
- Optimization: Constantly strive to optimize the team for efficient execution
- Innovation: Be the leader in introducing innovation and development best practices to the team
2. Engineering Team Lead Functions
- Leadership: Lead, energize, and inspire a growing team of 5-10 full-stack JavaScript/TypeScript/Native engineers building web and mobile applications.
- Collaboration: Report to the Head of Engineering and cooperate with peers across Avast.
- Talent Management: Hire, retain, and grow amazing engineering technical talent.
- Performance Management: Drive team performance by setting meaningful goals.
- Innovation: Help the team to bring innovative ideas and turn them into solutions.
- Communication: Actively listen. Ask why and provide the best possible solution.
- Cross-functional Cooperation: Cooperate with Product Management, UX Design, and other engineering teams.
- Ownership: Own the solution and be responsible for feature delivery, quality, and performance.
- Stakeholder Management: Gather external requirements from stakeholders.
- Team Management: Lead and manage the team in writing code, design, and testing.
- System Design: Design and implement scalable back-end systems.
- Collaboration: Work cross-functionally with other departments to gather necessary information on current projects.
- Beta Testing: Manage Beta efforts to test new features and design patterns.
3. Engineering Team Lead Job Description
- Leadership: Lead, coach, and mentor a cross-functional team of software engineers.
- Team Development: Help the team to grow as engineers, contributors to the business, and teammates.
- Collaboration: Be a close partner for Product and Business to find pragmatic solutions for customer needs that can be easily and quickly A/B tested.
- Culture Building: Actively contribute to and shape business, culture, and ways of working of the new Transactional Business Unit.
- Code Quality: Contribute to the team's work with clean, maintainable, and testable code and participate as well as lead design and code reviews.
- Performance Management: Manage the engineers on the team, developing their skills and helping advance their careers.
- Quality Assurance: Ensure the team consistently ships high-quality code and architecture.
- Software Development: Code (Go and Java) new and existing services to scale out event platform offerings.
- System Architecture: Contribute to the architecture and design of indexed data services.
- Problem Solving: Debug and solve challenging cross-system issues in production.
- Process Improvement: Help improve engineering tooling and practices.
- Technical Familiarity: Get familiar with the VMware Cloud portfolio about automation, orchestration, and extensibility.
- Mentorship: Lead by example a team of developers and act as a mentor for their future growth.
4. Engineering Team Lead Additional Details
- Leadership: Manage and mentor an agile software development team focused on the Interactive Quotes product, providing technical leadership and direction.
- Collaboration: Lead the design and development of innovative technical solutions in collaboration with Product, UX, Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales.
- Best Practices: Implement and enforce best practices to optimize performance and efficiency and ensure high-quality, well-designed, testable, scalable code.
- Agile Management: Lead agile planning and scoping activities.
- Requirements Breakdown: Break down product requirements into phased technical requirements that can be developed and deployed by others.
- Project Management: Lead development projects and ensure that they stay on track while providing progress updates to all levels of the organization.
- Architecture: Be involved in decision-making around the architecture and future of the product.
- Meeting Management: Take responsibility for setting and running team meetings.
- Talent Management: Evaluate hiring needs, and participate in the recruitment processes.
- Process Improvement: Communicate with the HR team to improve existing processes and organizational culture.
- Problem Solving: Help the team solve issues and participate in a roadmap discussion.
- Business Direction: Take extra responsibilities to ensure the business is moving in the right direction.
5. Engineering Team Lead General Responsibilities
- Leadership: Set the direction for the development and QA team members, making sure everyone understands and follows major technical decisions.
- Advocacy: Represent and advocate for the team at the company and department level.
- Alignment: Keep projects aligned with company objectives.
- Problem Solving: Remove blockers from the team's workflows.
- Mentorship: Mentor junior and mid-level engineers.
- Collaboration: Work alongside Engineering Manager and Business Unit Manager to create and support a rewarding working environment that aligns with the company culture.
- Ownership: Instill a sense of ownership, accountability, and technical excellence in the team driving efficient processes and constantly pushing engineering best practices.
- Culture Building: Help establish a culture of continuous learning in the team, where there is a collective understanding that anyone can speak up, contribute ideas, make mistakes, and grow without blame or embarrassment.
- Communication: Provide clarity to the team and others by setting expectations on project deliverables.
- Project Management: Understand which projects are on track and which are blocked.
- Feedback: Deliver specific feedback frequently to the team.
- Ownership: Take ownership of applications from inception to production monitoring and support.
- Solution Design: Develop robust and scalable solutions to support high-traffic applications.
- Code Quality: Contribute clean, secure, and maintainable code, and drive the same high standard among team.
- Architecture: Contribute to the evolution of the overall product/system architecture.
- Optimization: Optimize code for performance and scalability.
- Collaboration: Work with product owners/managers to plan and scope projects and features, working closely with technical and business teams at each stage of the development lifecycle.