Mrthdrb

I prepare my CV in German and I want to say Senior Design Engineer and Senior Engineer.

On Stack Exchange, I saw that erfahrener was used for senior.
However, on the Internet, mostly, people direct senior directly, for example:

Senior Engineer → Senior Ingenieur

How can you say Senior Design Engineer and Senior Engineer in German?

If you present yourself as

Senior Design Engineer

i.e. with an English job title, the Senior is of course fine.

If you want to use German terms you can say

Leitender Entwicklungsingenieur *)

but that would be pretty unusual. Today, in the larger industries, almost everything is called by English names, just glued together with some German grammar. The big boss in a company is today almost invariably a CEO, nobody calls himself a Generaldirektor any more (that's a term from about 100 years ago).

Still, if your job title is not that specific, you might prefer a genuine German title such as

Leitender Ingenieur :-)

instead of

Senior Engineer :-(

And of course, for jobs that have traditional, well-established German titles you use those. You would not present yourself as a

Baker, Carpenter, Machinist

but as a

Bäcker, Tischler, Dreher (or Industriemechaniker or whatever)

*) If that's what it is. I am not in design engineering. But dictionaries say design engineer is Entwicklungsingenieur. I personally would have guessed Produktdesigner, but I may be totally wrong with that idea.

The problem isn't Senior alone. It's also Ingenieur. What English speakers call an engineer is often enough a Techniker in German. In general

• you are a Techniker if you did a vocational training and/or attended a trade school.




• you are an Ingenieur if you studied at a technical university.

Technically the latter is Diplom-Ingenieur but no one but Austrians talks like that. (And there are exceptions as e.g. the Schiffsingenieur which is a naval officer.) Also, Bologna reforms added Bachelor and Master Of Science to that mingle, which aren't translated either.

If you did a computer science major at an university, you aren't an Ingenieur in German at all, but an Informatiker. The Diplom- et al is skipped in everyday talk, and put as Dipl.-Inf., Informatiker (BSc), Informatiker (MSc) in writing.

So … your job title isn't translateable at all. Do not translate it.