Core responsibilities

– Technical strategy and vision — define short‑ and long‑term technical goals that map to product and business objectives.
– Architecture and design guidance — ensure solution designs meet functional and non‑functional requirements and follow agreed patterns.
– Standards and best practices — establish coding standards, testing policies, release processes, and security controls.
– Delivery enablement — remove impediments, unblock teams, and shape engineering processes for predictable delivery.
– People development — mentor, coach, run technical interviews, and create career progression for engineers.
– Cross‑team collaboration — coordinate with product, QA, security, SRE, and ops to align priorities and integrations.
– Technical risk management — identify, communicate, and mitigate architectural and operational risks.

Day‑to‑day activities

– Review and approve designs, pull requests, and architecture proposals.
– Lead or participate in architecture meetings, code reviews, and sprint planning.
– Triage production incidents, drive root cause analysis, and own follow‑up remediation.
– Mentor engineers through 1:1s, design clinics, and brown‑bag sessions.
– Define and evolve CI/CD pipelines, observability, and test automation.
– Communicate technical status and trade‑offs to product and leadership.

Skills and behaviours

– Technical mastery — deep understanding of platforms, languages, distributed systems, and devops practices.
– Systems thinking — ability to reason about end‑to‑end flows, performance, failure modes, and emergent behaviour.
– Decision quality — make timely trade‑offs between speed, cost, reliability, and maintainability.
– Communication — explain complex technical topics simply to engineers and non‑technical stakeholders.
– Coaching mindset — raise team skill level rather than centralize all decisions.
– Influence without authority — align across teams and drive adoption of standards.
– Operational discipline — insist on monitoring, runbooks, SLOs, and post‑incident learning.

Practices, processes, and artefacts

– Engineering standards — style guides, dependency policies, security baselines, and performance budgets.
– Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) — record decisions, alternatives, and consequences for traceability.
– Code review culture — fast, constructive reviews with clear acceptance criteria.
– Automated pipelines — CI for builds and tests, CD for safe releases, automated security scans.
– Observability — metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting tied to SLOs.
– Incident process — runbooks, incident commander rotation, blameless postmortems, remediation backlog.
– Technical roadmap — prioritized tech initiatives, debt reduction plan, and measurable outcomes.

KPIs, maturity indicators, and common risks

– Key KPIs: deployment frequency; lead time for changes; change failure rate; mean time to recovery (MTTR); defect escape rate; number of production incidents; architecture debt index; time spent on maintenance vs. new features.
– Maturity indicators: automated testing and deployment; documented ADRs; SLOs with error budgets; consistent observability; ongoing technical mentoring; cross‑team reuse of components.
– Common risks: single‑point technical authority causing bottlenecks; underinvestment in ops and observability; accumulating technical debt; poor knowledge sharing; misalignment with product priorities.
– Mitigations: delegate decisions, enforce automated quality gates, dedicate cycles to debt and resilience, run regular cross‑team design reviews, measure outcomes not activity.