Long story short, it will only hurt your career if you let it. I have gone up and down a number of times, even from founder to Senior dev and back to Engineeri

Long story short, it will only hurt your career if you let it. I have gone up and down a number of times, even from founder to Senior dev and back to Engineering Manager and then Founder again and back to Senior Dev etc. I have had people ask me why and I have found it is the answer and honesty that counts. Also, on your CV, nothing says you have to list your current role as Lead Engineer/Developer. You can easily list it as Senior Developer and describe your job duties honestly as the Team Lead. It would stop the non-technical resume scanners from ruling you out and in all fairness is exactly what you are, lead is a role of a senior developer generally. Most companies classify it that way, and even if your official title was Lead Engineer, I'd put Senior Engineer and describe the role accurately so that more companies have the box to classify you for (HR type thing). If they ever call for a reference at the company the difference between Lead and Senior is lost in the noise. I do not consider this dishonest as you aren't claiming you had a role you didn't, you were still a Senior Dev, just also had lead responsibilities. The people that get rightfully smacked (and are lying) are the ones that claim they were CTO/CIO and were really a Senior Developer or something else. As an example, when I was at GE, there were 13 team leads on our large team and we referred to them as team leads. However, their official title was Senior Engineer. Some guys listed on their resume "Team Lead" others "Senior Engineer", neither was wrong. Hell, when we approved business cards for them no one cared whether they listed team lead or senior engineer either, just didn't matter.