A tech lead or engineering manager CV has a balancing act that a pure engineer CV does not. You need to prove you can still reason about systems, while showing you now deliver results through a team rather than through your own keyboard. Lean too far either way and you lose a chunk of roles: too technical and you read as a senior IC who got a title, too managerial and people wonder if you can still talk to your engineers.

Lead with scope and outcomes, not tools

For an IC, listing the stack near the top makes sense. For a lead, the first thing a hiring manager wants is scope: how many engineers, what kind of systems, what you were accountable for. Open your summary and your top role with that. "Led a team of 8 engineers across two squads owning the payments platform" tells a reader more in one line than a paragraph of technologies.

Then back it with outcomes. Shipped what, improved what, by how much. A lead's achievements are usually team-level: reduced incident rate, cut deployment time, delivered a migration, grew the team. Quantify these the same way you would quantify any CV achievement.

Show both the people and the technical sides

The roles you are targeting want evidence of both. On the people side, name what you actually did: hiring, mentoring, performance management, setting technical direction, running planning. On the technical side, show you still operate at a senior level: architecture decisions you owned, hard technical calls you made, systems you understand deeply.

The mistake is dropping the technical detail entirely once you have a manager title. Engineering leaders are hired partly on whether their engineers will respect them, and a CV with no technical substance raises a flag.

Tailor to the flavor of the role

Tech lead and engineering manager are not the same job, and titles are used loosely across companies. Some lead roles are hands-on with a team of three; some manager roles are pure people leadership over multiple teams. Read the posting and weight your CV toward the side it emphasizes. A hands-on lead role wants more recent technical depth, while a people-management role wants more on org-building and cross-team work.

Keep the technical skills section honest and current

List the languages, systems, and tools you genuinely work with or could review competently. As a lead you are not expected to be deepest in every one, but listing a stack you have not touched in five years invites a question you cannot answer well. Keep it current and let your experience bullets carry the depth.

Make sure your LinkedIn tells the same story

Engineering leadership roles are heavily sourced through LinkedIn, and recruiters will compare your profile to your CV. If your LinkedIn still reads like a senior engineer while your CV claims leadership scope, that gap costs you. Building your CV from an up-to-date LinkedIn profile with a tool like Postulit keeps the two aligned, so a recruiter checking both sees one consistent leader rather than two different candidates.