You manage the team directly: 1:1s, feedback, performance, promotions, and the hard conversations. You own delivery so that what we decide to build turns into shipped software on a rhythm we can count on. You notice when someone is blocked and help them get unstuck without making yourself the dependency for every decision. When someone is struggling, you address it early.
The part of this role we care about most is helping people become better professionals: better at scoping, estimating, making decisions, and owning outcomes rather than tasks. If your instinct when an engineer struggles is to take the work back, this isn’t the role. If your instinct is to figure out what they’re missing and help them develop it, keep reading.
You still write and ship code. Not because we need another full-time individual contributor, but because I don’t believe you can effectively manage this team if you’ve stopped building. You stay hands-on to make better technical decisions, work through difficult problems, and improve how the team builds. Your job is not to become the team’s busiest engineer or the person every release depends on.
You use coding agents in real work and understand where they help, where they fail, and how to verify their output. You make the team better by showing what works and helping people apply it – not by mandating tools or mistaking more generated code for better engineering. You can challenge architectural decisions, explain the tradeoffs, and help the team choose an approach it can ship and maintain.
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Delivery: Planning, scoping, and shipping quality software against a roadmap you help shape. You make tradeoffs explicit and push back when we’re asking the team to do more than it can do well.
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How the team works: Enough structure to make delivery predictable, not so much that it slows a small team down. You remove friction, address recurring blockers, and improve how we use AI tooling.
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People: Hiring, clear expectations, regular feedback, growth, promotions, and exits when they’re necessary.
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Technical judgment: Staying close enough to the code and architecture to challenge decisions and support engineers without becoming the approval gate for everything.
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The engineering response to escalations: Getting the right people involved, making priority calls, and addressing recurring causes across customer, services-team, and open-source issues. You’re accountable for the response, not expected to personally fix every problem.