Is Tech Lead a senior IC role or a manager role?

It is a senior IC role with leadership scope. You are accountable for the technical direction of a team but you do not own the hire-and-fire, salary review or performance management of the engineers in it. The Engineering Manager does. On your CV, position yourself as a technical leader: ADRs you wrote, system design choices you defended, mentoring you delivered. If you also did people-management work because your EM was on leave, name it as 'covered EM duties for a quarter' rather than blurring the lines.

How much code should I show I write as a Tech Lead?

Most UK Tech Leads in 2026 are still writing 30-60% of the time. Hiring panels at smaller companies expect more; at larger ones, less. Show this with a single line: 'Wrote and reviewed roughly 60% of merged PRs across the squad in 2025'. If you are applying to a Staff Engineer role, the panel will probe your hands-on coding bar, so do not undersell. If you are applying to an Engineering Manager role, show that you can step back from the keyboard.

Should I include open-source work or talks?

Yes, if it demonstrates technical depth or leadership. Maintainership of a meaningful open-source library, a conference talk at a recognised event (QCon, GOTO, Lead Dev), or a published technical blog with traffic data — all signal seniority. Skip drive-by PRs to popular repos, lightning talks at small meetups (unless you are early-career), and conference attendance. If you have a personal blog, link it in your header alongside GitHub and LinkedIn, but only if the writing is current and good.

CV Example · Tech Leadership · UK 2026

Tech Lead CV Example UK

Tech Lead is the most miswritten CV in technology. Most candidates either over-claim management responsibility they did not have, or under-claim technical leadership they absolutely did. The honest version is what wins: you are a senior IC who sets technical direction for a small team, leads design reviews, mentors more junior engineers, and is on the hook when production breaks. Lead with the team size, the system you are responsible for, and the recent technical decision you can defend. Hiring panels are looking for taste and judgement, not a list of acronyms.

By Alex · 12-year UK recruiter · Updated April 2026

Example header

Aisha Khan · Tech Lead · 9 years · Bristol / hybrid

Personal statement / Professional summary

Tech Lead with 9 years in backend and platform engineering, currently leading a squad of 6 engineers building the merchant-data platform at a B2B SaaS business. Set the technical direction for the migration from a Postgres-centric monolith to a Kafka-backed event store, shipped over 14 months with no data-loss incidents. Comfortable owning architecture decisions end-to-end and writing the ADRs that justify them. Strong opinions on observability, schema design and incident readiness. Looking for a Staff Engineer or Principal role in a product business with a serious data-platform problem.

Bullet point examples

Strong bullets follow the same shape: action verb, specific scope, quantified outcome. Use these as patterns, not as copy-paste templates — the numbers must be your own.

Technical direction

Set the technical direction for the merchant-data platform migration from a Postgres-centric monolith to a Kafka-backed event store, shipped in 14 months with no data-loss incidents.
Authored 23 architecture decision records in 2025, all reviewed in open design forums; 19 adopted, 4 rejected based on team feedback.

Team and mentoring

Lead a squad of 6 engineers (2 senior, 3 mid, 1 junior) with delivery accountability for the platform but no formal line-management responsibility.
Mentored two mid-level engineers through promotion to senior in 12 months, including running weekly technical office hours and pairing on system-design exercises.

Reliability

Reduced platform error rate from 0.84% to 0.06% over three quarters by leading a tracing rollout and rewriting four of the highest-error endpoints.
On-call lead for the Data platform tier; ran 11 incident retros in 2025 and shipped a runbook overhaul that cut median MTTR from 38 to 11 minutes.

Code and delivery

Wrote and reviewed 60-65% of merged PRs across the squad in 2025; introduced the team's PR-template and review-SLA process.
Cut CI build time from 22 minutes to 7 minutes by parallelising the test suite and removing 320 dead tests, recovering an estimated 18 engineering hours per week.

Cross-team influence

Co-led the cross-org schema-governance group with the Head of Data; produced a written contract testing standard now used by 9 of 11 product squads.
Represented Engineering on the Architecture Review Board, reviewing 14 proposals from other squads in 2025 and contributing to the org's adopted-tech list.

Skills section — what to list

Mirror the skills exactly as they appear in target job ads. The ATS reads this section literally — synonyms hurt match scores.

System design and architectureEvent-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ)Distributed systems and consistency modelsBackend services in Go, Java or TypeScriptPostgres and SQL performance tuningAPI design (REST, gRPC, GraphQL)AWS or GCP production experienceObservability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)Incident command and on-callCode review at scaleMentoring and technical coachingArchitecture decision recordsCI/CD pipeline ownershipSchema design and contract testingThreat modelling and secure coding

Tech Lead-specific CV mistakes that get you binned

× Claiming line-management responsibility you did not have — Tech Lead is technical leadership without HR authority. Be honest; senior engineers respect candour, not inflated titles.
× Listing every technology you have ever touched — pick the ones you can defend in a technical interview and drop the rest.
× Skipping the team size and squad structure — hiring managers need to know if you led 4 engineers or 14.
× Forgetting incidents — your behaviour during a P1 is one of the strongest signals of seniority. Name an incident you led the response on.
× Writing only about delivery — Tech Leads who cannot point to a technical bet they made and the trade-offs they accepted look like delivery managers, not technologists.

Common questions

Is Tech Lead a senior IC role or a manager role?: It is a senior IC role with leadership scope. You are accountable for the technical direction of a team but you do not own the hire-and-fire, salary review or performance management of the engineers in it. The Engineering Manager does. On your CV, position yourself as a technical leader: ADRs you wrote, system design choices you defended, mentoring you delivered. If you also did people-management work because your EM was on leave, name it as 'covered EM duties for a quarter' rather than blurring the lines.
How much code should I show I write as a Tech Lead?: Most UK Tech Leads in 2026 are still writing 30-60% of the time. Hiring panels at smaller companies expect more; at larger ones, less. Show this with a single line: 'Wrote and reviewed roughly 60% of merged PRs across the squad in 2025'. If you are applying to a Staff Engineer role, the panel will probe your hands-on coding bar, so do not undersell. If you are applying to an Engineering Manager role, show that you can step back from the keyboard.
Should I include open-source work or talks?: Yes, if it demonstrates technical depth or leadership. Maintainership of a meaningful open-source library, a conference talk at a recognised event (QCon, GOTO, Lead Dev), or a published technical blog with traffic data — all signal seniority. Skip drive-by PRs to popular repos, lightning talks at small meetups (unless you are early-career), and conference attendance. If you have a personal blog, link it in your header alongside GitHub and LinkedIn, but only if the writing is current and good.