[skrebbel]

"...you will communicate across our accounting and sales teams to discover what will make our clients super happy and what will help us increase sales in new verticals..." - I'm sorry, this is not what a lead engineer does. No serious engineer would want to do that, I would be busy enough dealing with technical debt, implementing new features and actually leading a team of engineers.

Wait. Did you just claim that a lead engineer doesn't communicate with non-engineers or think about how tech can improve the business? If not that, what does a lead engineer do? Isn't the whole point of being in the lead that you have an ability to set a direction? How are you going to do that without looking outside the field of engineering itself?

In decent companies, management is done because someone's gotta do it. They ask for a lead engineer, not for 'the team's best engineer'. There's no need for the lead to also be the genius. In fact,I'd have the genius focus fulltime on doing what he does best, which a good lead engineer can enable.

[eduardordm]

Lead engineers work close to product managers, product designers and the engineers. Your comment is awfully agressive unnecessarily, by the way.

A nice description of a lead engineer role:

http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/tokyo/ops-support...