How to hire a Technical Lead
What the role does, the job description, the interview questions, and the 40-minute screening pack that tells you who can do the job before you book a single interview.
The role
What a Technical Lead does
A Technical Lead sits in the Engineering function. The sections below give you the job description, the interview questions and the screening pack for the role.
Screen before you interview
The Technical Lead screening pack
Engineering leadership plus staying technical: code, algorithms and delivery. Every applicant gets one link. You get one ranked report.
- 1
How do you split your week between coding and leading?
- 2
Describe a technical decision you made that the team disagreed with.
- 3
How do you handle a strong engineer who is hard to work with?
- 4
Walk us through how you run code review.
- 5
How do you keep technical debt from swallowing the roadmap?
Interview questions
Technical Lead interview questions
For the candidates who pass the pack. Each comes with a sample answer on the full page.
Ask these after the screening pack, not instead of it. A candidate who has already scored on Software Engineering Management, Software Engineer, Algorithms for Software Engineering, DevOps has shown they can do the work, which frees the interview to do what a test cannot: find out how they think, how they explain themselves, and how they behave when something goes wrong.
- Ask every Technical Lead candidate the same questions in the same order. Comparable answers are the whole point; a different conversation with each person tells you who you liked, not who was strongest.
- Look for a specific example with a result, not a description of how the candidate would approach it in principle. Follow up once with “what happened next?” and stop talking.
- Score each answer before moving to the next question, and write down what was said rather than the impression it left.
- At volume, record the first 4 of these instead of calling. Candidates answer on their own time, the answers are transcribed and scored, and you keep live interviews for the shortlist.
The pack takes a candidate about 40 minutes, so a Technical Lead applicant arrives at this interview already measured on the parts you can measure without a meeting.
- 01
What made you move from senior engineer into a technical lead role?
- 02
Describe a team and project you led technically.
- 03
How do you balance hands-on coding with leadership responsibilities?
- 04
What kind of engineering culture do you try to build?
- 05
How do you run technical design reviews?
- 06
How do you manage technical debt on your team?
- 07
How do you ensure code quality across a team?
- 08
How do you estimate and plan delivery for your team?
Frequently asked questions
Send every applicant one link that carries 4 skills tests (Software Engineering Management, Software Engineer, Algorithms for Software Engineering, DevOps), 2 personality inventories and 5 one-way video questions. springhire scores everything automatically and ranks the candidates, so you interview the top few. The free plan covers 10 candidates a month.
About 40 minutes for the tests, plus 10 to 15 minutes for the video questions. Candidates complete it on their own time, on any device.
A short brief, key responsibilities, must-have and nice-to-have skills and the requirements. The JD generator writes one for this role in a minute.
Questions that ask for a specific past example and a walkthrough of how the candidate thinks. This page lists 8 with sample answers, and the full bank has more.
Yes. The free plan includes every screening tool with 10 candidate credits a month and no card. Paid plans start at $39 a month.
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