Job Titles Are Out. Now We’re All ‘Members of the Technical Staff.’

Employees at leading artificial intelligence companies are trading in specific, and impressive, titles — like “chief technical officer” and “senior software engineer” — in favor of a vague one: “member of the technical staff.”

A.I. researcher? You may be a member of the technical staff. Senior product management leader? You may be called that, too.

The title has popped up all over A.I. company job listings and organizational charts. As of last December, 39 percent of employees at Anthropic, 31 percent at OpenAI and 26 percent at xAI listed “member of technical staff” as their current position on LinkedIn, according to an analysis by the Stanford University researchers Nick Bloom and Gideon Slocum Moore. Its use has risen by 50 percent in the last year among employees at Anthropic, OpenAI, MicrosoftAI and xAI, the analysis found.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/business/members-of-technical-staff-artificial-intelligence.html