[tytso]

You can find ways of being a technical leader without having a formal role. You can mentor more junior engineers; you can try to establish better coding and test/QA standards at your company. You can find some open source project that you're passionate about, and take on leadership roles there. Maybe you can find a way to contribute in standards organization.

If I'm interviewing you for a job at $COMPANY, I'm going to be looking for signs that you can exhibit leadership, and that's going to be way more important than whatever title that you might have. If you have the title, but you can't demonstrate ways in which you were able to demonstrate technical leadership, the title isn't going to mean much.