Leading a Cross-Functional Team — Enterprise HR/Payroll
Associate Tech Lead on an enterprise HR/Payroll modernization engagement with a US-based Fortune 500 client — leading 18 engineers and QAs while owning delivery, architecture, and stakeholder alignment.
Context
An enterprise HR/Payroll platform for a US-based Fortune 500 client, used by large organisations for workforce management, payroll processing, and compliance. I lead the engineering effort on this engagement as Associate Tech Lead — responsible for technical delivery, the team, and the health of the client relationship.
What I Own
The team is 18 people — developers and QA engineers — coordinating daily across multiple time zones with offshore counterparts and directly with the client's product and engineering teams. My responsibilities span several layers:
Delivery and execution: Maintaining delivery velocity, managing risks before they become blockers, and ensuring the team has clarity on priorities and unblocked paths to ship.
Architecture: Running architecture reviews, making decisions on microservices structure, and ensuring the technical direction holds up as the product scales. Current work includes building responsive, real-time interfaces with React and TypeScript and implementing complex form validations and role-based access controls for HR workflows.
Team and people: The team operates through a layered leadership structure — four track leads who each own a smaller sub-team and report to me on risks, issues, and dependencies across their tracks. My role is to stay close enough to each track to make good decisions, while deliberately pushing ownership, accountability, and growth opportunities down to the leads. The goal is a team that does not depend on me for every call.
Stakeholder alignment: Communicating progress, risks, and technical decisions to both client-side stakeholders and internal leadership.
Account ownership: Alongside the delivery role, I carry a stretch responsibility as Account Owner — accountable for the health of the engagement from a commercial and resourcing perspective, including pre-sales work and strategic proposals.
Key Learnings
Leading a cross-functional team across time zones is operationally demanding in ways that are hard to anticipate from individual contributor experience. The coordination overhead is real — and if you do not design for it deliberately, it consumes the entire day and leaves no space for the technical and strategic work that actually requires your expertise.
The biggest shift has been learning to create clarity at scale. When you are one engineer, ambiguity in a requirement costs you a day. When you are leading 18 people, the same ambiguity costs 18 people a day. Getting precise on scope, expectations, and acceptance criteria earlier in a cycle is worth more than any technical optimisation.
Ongoing Challenges
Keeping the team's technical decisions consistent and well-reasoned as the codebase grows and new engineers join. Building the second layer of leadership so the team does not depend on me for every decision. Balancing client expectations against what is actually sustainable for the team over a long engagement.