- 'Tech lead' is an ambiguous job title. I had three clients in the same building at one point all recruiting for a 'Tech Lead', and all were completely different jobs.

- They might not even call it a Tech Lead. Whilst you may think that it is fairly obvious what the difference between a Senior Engineer, Tech Lead, Team Lead, Principal, Staff Engineer and so on are; it is actually not clearly defined company to company. 🤯

- Companies would normally prefer to promote someone into that position then hire externally for it.

As a Senior/ Tech Lead then, how can you navigate that? 🔍

- Rather then focussing on the job title, think deeply about what it is you want to do on a day-to-day basis. The clear separations you need are (1) what percentage hands-on coding are you happy with, from 0% - 100%. (2) are you looking to manage the team from a human resources perspective, or lead from a technical one. For example, if someone is sick or underperforming - do you want that to be your problem, or someone else?

- Once you know that, I would strongly recommend exploring an internal move if you can. If a company is going to hire externally for a 'tech lead' they will want someone with significant 'tech lead' (in their definition of that role) experience, not normally a Senior stepping up, unfortunately.

- If that isn’t possible, I would recommend looking for a sideways step into a business with a career path, and a proven track record of promoting senior engineers into the type of Tech Lead role that you want. Proven promotion, retention and succession planning of engineers are key indicators of a healthy engineering team.

Is the move about progressing your job title/ not taking a backwards step, moving into management and away from code, increasing your pay, or is it about shifting the focus of your role into architecture and solution design?

- If you’re not too bothered about the job title, or directly managing other engineers, you may find that there is enough variation with how companies define a senior engineer to offer you what you want.

A lot of my clients for example set a bar for a senior engineering hire at what many would considered a tech lead level elsewhere because of the focus on architecture and design. If you want to step away from purely coding, or have a bigger input into the solutioning you might be able to achieve that by finding a better Senior Engineering role, rather then thinking you need a Tech Lead role.

And it will make your job search much easier. 🥂