Tech Lead

Credible resume terms

Terms that should plausibly appear on a real Tech Lead resume. “Must-have” marks the ones whose total absence is a genuine red flag.

• Tech Lead

  The engineer accountable for a team's technical direction and delivery — usually without direct reports.

• System DesignMust-have

  The practice of planning how a software system's components fit together to meet requirements like scale, reliability, and performance — a common senior-level interview topic.

• HLD

  The 'zoomed-out' design of a system — which major components exist (services, databases, caches), how they connect, and how data flows between them — without getting into implementation detail.

• Design Docs / RFCs / ADRsMust-have

  Short written documents engineers circulate before building something significant: the problem, the options considered, the chosen approach and its risks.

• Code ReviewMust-have

  The practice of having other engineers read and comment on code changes before they're merged, to catch bugs and share knowledge.

• Technical Debt

  Shortcuts or quick fixes taken to ship faster, which create extra work later.

• Microservices

  An architecture where an application is split into many small, independently deployable services, instead of one large program.

• API

  A defined way for two pieces of software to talk to each other — e.g. your app requesting data from a server.

• CI/CD

  Automated pipelines that test and deploy code changes frequently and reliably, instead of manual, infrequent releases.

• Observability

  The practice of instrumenting systems (logs, metrics, traces) so engineers can understand what's happening inside them and diagnose problems in production.

• Capacity Estimation

  Roughly calculating a system's expected scale — storage needed, requests per second, bandwidth — early in a design, to sanity-check whether an approach can actually work before building it.

• Git

  The standard tool for tracking changes to code over time and enabling multiple people to collaborate on the same codebase without overwriting each other's work.

Tech Lead: screening questions

One question per core skill, must-haves first. Each term’s page shows what a junior and a senior answer sound like.

1. Design Docs / RFCs / ADRs

   “Tell me about a design doc you wrote. What options did you reject, and did the review change your plan?”

2. System Design

   “Walk me through a system you designed from scratch. What was the hardest tradeoff you had to make?”

3. Code Review

   “Tell me about a time a code review changed your approach, or you pushed back on one.”

4. Capacity Estimation

   “Walk me through how you'd estimate the storage a new feature would need, just from a rough sense of user count and usage.”

5. Tech Lead

   “What did you delegate that you'd have done differently yourself, and how did you handle it?”

Adjacent, but not real signal

These read as related, but they don’t tell you this candidate can do this job — they usually belong to one of the roles below.

• OKRs

  A goal-setting framework: a qualitative Objective paired with measurable Key Results used to track progress toward it.

• Scrum Master

  Facilitates a Scrum team's process — runs the ceremonies, removes blockers, and protects the team from interruption.

• Technical Program Manager

  Runs large technical programmes that span several teams — tracking dependencies, unblocking, and keeping everyone honest about dates, without owning the engineers.

Most often confused with

• Engineering Manager

  Leads a team of engineers as their people manager: hiring, one-to-ones, performance reviews, growing people and making sure the team delivers. Technical enough to review designs and challenge estimates, but rarely writes production code. Different from a Tech Lead, who owns the technical direction, usually without direct reports.

• Software Architect

Tech Lead: search strings