Due to unforeseen circumstances from past 6 - 8 months, I've been the Senior most engineer in my team, (I've a total of just 2.7~ YOE). My team consists of 12~ SDE 1s (New Hires) and 2 SDE2s (The other SDE2 being promoted very recently). My manager does a great job filling the role of Senior Engineer which reduces bit of pressure off of me.
However, due to necessity in the team I've ended up being SME in all the services owned by our team. This leads to everyone reaching out to me to help them with their queries, I try to document some of these and add in the Wikis so that it can be easily accessible for others next time. However, when it comes to certain tickets and issues, I end up having to pick that task up myself (Manager does not ask me to, but at same time i know that for someone else the ramp up time required to fix the issue would be too high).
I recently tried to reduce this (2~ months ago), this led to our overall ticket health getting worse and I had to again start looking into them myself and guiding each on-call cycle with right action items for the tickets etc.
This involves me helping them to do the following :-
Due to which it ends up taking 6+ hours weekly to keep this running. I don't really mind doing this, however i don't feel this is a scalable solution and would eventually want to slowly scale down from doing this and have my team being able to be self-sufficient.
What's the best way to go about this without affecting my team's ticket health?
I'm interpreting what your saying as you are effectively acting as a senior engineer by being the SME on your team's services by doing things like fielding queries from other teams, and this is leading to you having to choose between acting in this capacity or addressing your team's ticket queue.
The simple answer is that a senior engineer is expected to do both at a high level. There are three paths forward
Realize that the way out of this is by taking a longer-term perspective and by making sure your day-to-day is chipping away at making yourself and your team's processes more efficient.
Hope that helps.
-Steve
Building off what Steve wrote (drive long term fixes), perhaps you don't have to solve this problem entirely on your own either, but take a directive role instead.
You can work with your manager with come up a list of consistently recurring issues. You manager should really want to solve this issue as well, because they can't afford to have single-point-of-failure in the team. You may ask questions to yourself and your manager to figure out what is the main contributor and address it systematically.
For example:
Once you have a list of potential deeper issues and possible solutions, prioritize them. You can then either work on the priority solutions yourself, or delegate to a fellow engineer (maybe one of the recently promoted folks?) and you can guide their work.
I've had this myself too to a point I haven't really gotten to do much coding in the last few months. My job though is to make the team better and to take on the grunt work when necessary to keep everyone helping at a high rate. In my case, people around me are working ~70hr weeks and I'm working ~55 max with a lot of my days finishing up midday really because there is no work to do. I scale through others by asking them to do the hard work I don't know how to do and then I jump in to ease up the pressure on my juniors by spending quality time in the trenches. Once one trench gets cleaned up, then we as a team can be re-deployed to help with other trenches. As stated before, document a lot and keep a long term focus. Focus on teaching them as much as possible and encouraging them to help each other grow, otherwise the situation becomes untenable very quickly and you start getting turnover.