What Does Your IT Title Hierarchy Look Like?

We've got a mixture of roles on the tech side, including Principal, Lead, Senior, and General Engineers without modifiers. Interestingly, my Principal role lines up with a Director in terms of hierarchy, but I report to a Senior Manager. It throws a wrench in the typical structure, but it works for us since I prefer a purely technical position.

For our infrastructure team, the titles go from Junior Specialist to Specialist, then to Junior Engineer, Engineer, Senior Engineer, and finally, Staff Engineer. On the management side, it flows from Team Lead to Junior Product Owner and up to C-suite. We have around 2000 employees and millions of B2C users, though B2B is much smaller.

In my organization, the hierarchy is pretty straightforward. We have a standard org chart that starts with the manager at the top—who often seems stuck in meetings. Then, there are team leads who mostly serve as project managers. Below that, we have various technical roles that are often waiting on approvals from higher-ups. It's a bit of a bottleneck, to be honest.

We don’t have a set hierarchy yet—it's all a bit haphazard. Currently, we have an IT Manager who reports to the Director of IT, who then reports to the CFO. We're looking to formalize this better, but honestly, it’s still pretty thrown together right now.

I keep it simple: Manager, Team Lead, and Individual Contributors. The IC roles range from Junior to Mid and then onward to Senior and Staff. I think titles can sometimes be overcomplicated—it’s easier when everyone plays a role without needing too many fancy titles.