Engineering Manager vs. Tech Lead: Which Hire Does Your Startup Need

This is one of the most common questions we hear from technical founders scaling their engineering teams. Should I hire a tech lead or an engineering manager. The answer depends entirely on where your team is today and what is actually breaking.

These two roles are often confused because they both involve seniority and leadership. But they solve fundamentally different problems, and hiring the wrong one will leave the real problem unaddressed.

Defining the Roles

Tech Lead

A tech lead is a senior engineer who takes ownership of the technical direction of a team or project. They write code, make architecture decisions, review pull requests, and are the technical authority on their domain. They typically spend 60-80 percent of their time writing code and 20-40 percent on coordination and mentoring.

A tech lead does not manage people in the formal sense. They do not do one-on-ones about career growth, they do not make compensation decisions, and they do not handle performance issues. Their authority is technical, not organizational.

Engineering Manager

An engineering manager owns the people side of an engineering team. They conduct one-on-ones, set goals, provide feedback, manage performance, hire new team members, and ensure the team is healthy, productive, and growing. They typically spend 0-30 percent of their time writing code and 70-100 percent on people management and coordination.

An engineering manager may or may not be deeply technical. The best ones are, because technical credibility helps them earn trust and make better resourcing decisions. But their primary skill is managing humans, not writing software.

The Decision Framework

Hire a Tech Lead When

Your codebase is growing in complexity faster than your team can manage. You have multiple engineers working on interconnected systems without clear ownership. Architecture decisions are being made inconsistently or not being made at all. Technical debt is accumulating because nobody is making deliberate tradeoff decisions.

You need a tech lead when the primary bottleneck is technical, not organizational. The team is motivated and getting along, but the code is a mess and nobody is steering the architecture.

Hire an Engineering Manager When

Your engineers are frustrated, burning out, or leaving. People issues are consuming the founder or CTO's time. Career growth conversations are not happening. Hiring is stalled because nobody owns the recruiting process for the team. Cross-functional coordination is breaking down because engineers are talking past product managers and designers.

You need an engineering manager when the primary bottleneck is organizational, not technical. The engineers are talented, but the human systems around them are failing.

Hire Both When

Your team has more than 8-10 engineers, the codebase has multiple complex subsystems, and you have both technical and organizational problems. At this point, splitting the responsibilities between a tech lead who owns the code and an engineering manager who owns the people is the right move.

The dual-leadership model works when the tech lead and engineering manager have a strong working relationship and clearly delineated responsibilities. It fails when they compete for authority or do not communicate.

Common Mistakes

Promoting Your Best Engineer to Manager

This is the most common mistake in engineering leadership. Your best engineer is not necessarily your best manager. In fact, the skills that make someone an exceptional individual contributor, deep focus, preference for uninterrupted work, comfort with solitary problem-solving, are often the opposite of what management requires.

Some great engineers are also great managers. But do not assume the correlation. Ask the person if they actually want to manage people, and if they say yes, invest in training them. Being a new manager without support is one of the most stressful experiences in professional life.

Hiring a Manager Before You Have Technical Leadership

If your engineering team does not have a clear technical direction and you hire a people manager, you have solved the wrong problem. The manager will not be able to set the technical vision, and the team will still flounder on architecture decisions. Always establish technical leadership first, whether through a tech lead, a CTO, or a staff engineer, and then layer management on top.

Expecting One Person to Do Both

The combined tech lead and engineering manager role is seductive in theory. One person who owns both the code and the people. In practice, this only works for teams of 3-5 engineers. Beyond that, both responsibilities require too much time and context to be held by one person effectively.

When one person tries to do both at scale, one side always suffers. Usually it is the management side, because writing code feels more productive and urgent than having a career development conversation. The engineers start feeling neglected, and retention drops.

Interview Differences

Interviewing a Tech Lead

Focus on technical depth, architecture judgment, and mentoring ability. Have them review a real architecture decision from your codebase and explain what they would change and why. Ask them to walk through how they would approach a complex technical problem in your domain. Ask about times they have mentored junior engineers and what approaches worked.

Interviewing an Engineering Manager

Focus on people management experience, conflict resolution, and hiring track record. Ask them to describe a time they managed a low performer through to improvement or exit. Ask how they structure one-on-ones and what they are trying to learn in each one. Ask them to describe the best team they ever built and what made it work. Ask about a time they had to deliver difficult feedback and how they approached it.

The Bottom Line

The tech lead and the engineering manager are not interchangeable. They solve different problems and require different skills. Start by identifying whether your bottleneck is technical or organizational, hire accordingly, and resist the temptation to combine the roles as your team scales beyond a handful of engineers.