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.
How it’s pronounced
/mem-bər əv thə tek-ni-kəl staf/
The general title can keep competitors in the dark and give technical employees insider status. It may also imply a valorous focus on the work itself rather than rank.
In a December 2024 post from the artificial intelligence company ElevenLabs, a staffer wrote, “job titles can be a distraction. They remove attention from the outcomes of the work.” Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI executive, has mused that “just by calling everyone ‘member of the technical staff,’ we were able to have a much more level playing field.”
Silicon Valley has long sought to burnish its prestige by recruiting people who want to change the world, not just get rich. And A.I. firms, even as they gear up for blockbuster public offerings, are eager to signal they are “less about the money and more about the science,” said Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington and the author of “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.” After all, these for-profit companies call themselves “labs.” The staff title, Dr. O’Mara added, “isn’t like C.T.O. or these other titles that are business-y rather than having to do with actual research or the technology itself.”
The title can also obscure who is actually responsible for building this technology, at a time when fears of A.I. are rising. The approach, Dr. O’Mara said, “emphasizes collaboration, but it also de-emphasizes accountability.”
Though “member of the technical staff” is newly trendy, Bell Labs, founded in 1925, was using the term in its early decades, according to Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation” and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. The humble-sounding title held cachet: “Some of the best thinkers and researchers at Bell Labs didn’t want to work their way up in management; they wanted to do experiments, and find new knowledge,” Mr. Gertner wrote in an email. In the 1960s, at least a handful of employees at firms including IBM, Texas Instruments and Hughes Aircraft also had the title, the Stanford researchers found.
In the world of A.I., the title is catching on just as the technology these companies build is remaking jobs, especially software engineering jobs. Perhaps the title’s vagueness will enable employees to pivot to new technical tasks as A.I. evolves, and perhaps its prestige will offer some consolation to these engineers as their day-to-day duties are replaced by the tools they are creating. The glorification of members of the technical staff, Dr. O’Mara reflected, is “coming at a time when the actual products that these companies are creating are undermining engineering skills and value.”
For now, people in the industry are clamoring to identify with the role. As one Google DeepMind employee who until recently was a product manager wrote in a LinkedIn post this year: “officially giving up my ‘PM’ title, we are all members of the technical staff now, time to embrace it.”
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