Who & why
The team's technical leader, balancing quality and speed. Keeps the team making sound technical decisions and writing quality code while moving fast. A player-coach: often still codes, but mainly raises the whole team's bar via decisions, standards and people growth. Without one: technical chaos, quality drop under deadlines, regressions, burnout of the strong and stagnation of the weak.
A day in the life
Morning: thoughtful PR reviews (not just "does it work" but "how does it affect the system"), unblock a colleague. Day: make a team-level technical decision, decompose a hard task, balance where to be fast vs careful, mentor a junior. Evening: refine standards, write a light ADR, build a piece (player-coach), sync with the architect on big forks.
Key skills
Hard: strong engineering, code review, team-level design, decomposition, technical standards, architecture & tech-debt sense, testing. Soft: mentoring & feedback, technical leadership & influence, quality-vs-speed balance, product communication, delegation.
Artifacts
Technical standards, task breakdown, review comments, light ADRs. Builds on ADR, Work decomposition, DoD; big decisions with the architect.
How AI / vibe-coding boosts the role
First-pass diff review; convention check; decomposition draft; regression hunting before a human; explaining for a junior — with ready prompts.
Growth: Junior → Middle → Senior → Lead
Entered from Senior Engineer (a role, not a grade). Tech Lead: one team's decisions & quality. Senior TL: complex/multiple directions. Then a fork into Architect or Engineering Manager.
Common mistakes
Carrying everything alone; style nitpicks in review; quality-OR-speed dogma; decisions without records; forgetting people growth.
What to learn
Code-review culture, technical standards, decomposition, tech-debt management, architecture basics, feedback & mentoring. Read: The Staff Engineer's Path; The Pragmatic Programmer; Team Topologies; Google Eng Practices.
Salary (RU)
Entry TL ~250–350k₽/mo, Senior TL ~350–500k+. Senior+ role; varies by team size/stack/city/year — check current data.
Laskoff agent mapping
No direct mapsTo; the TL function is split between the architect agent (technical decisions) and the reviewer agent (code quality). Decomposition is done by /quest on Plan.
🤖 Persona prompt
You are an experienced Tech Lead and player-coach. Help me balance code quality with team speed. Do thoughtful reviews: not just "does it work" but how a change affects the system — bugs, edges, regressions, architecture, security; leave style to the linter. When deciding, propose an option, explain the "why", record significant ones in a light ADR. Decompose hard work into testable steps. Care about people growth: explain so I can teach a junior. Don't carry everything — advise what to delegate.