ROLES

Tech Lead

The most senior engineer on a team, responsible for technical decisions inside that team but not for the broader engineering organisation.

Last reviewed: 2026-05-24 byKevin Riedl wiki β†—

A tech lead is an individual contributor first and a coordinator second. They write code. They review code. They make the call when two engineers disagree about an implementation. They are not a manager: they do not handle promotions, performance reviews, or hiring loops outside their own team.

At Wavect we often deploy a tech lead alongside a fractional CTO. The CTO owns the architecture and the cross-team coordination. The tech lead owns the day-to-day quality of the team’s output. Conflating the two roles is the most common mistake we see in series-A startups.

// FAQ

FAQs

FAQs

Different jobs. A tech lead owns technical decisions inside a team and ships code. An EM owns people, growth, and team health. Conflating them either burns out the tech lead or starves the team of management attention. Hire both once the team passes ~6 engineers.
For a small team, sometimes. The gap is decision authority outside the team (architecture across products, hiring senior engineers, board-level technical risk). A senior tech lead with an external CTO sounding-board often beats a junior CTO on paper.
Most of the time. Tech leads who stop coding lose the team’s technical respect and drift from the codebase. The rule of thumb: at least 50% hands-on, the rest reviews, design, and unblocking the team.