A once-obscure job title is taking hold across hiring boards and LinkedIn profiles: “member of technical staff.”
At companies like OpenAI, the title could be applied to a senior engineer with a decade-plus of experience under their belt. Or it could refer to a cofounder or tech leader who was previously in a C-suite role. But it just as easily might describe a junior employee who is early in their career.
Now “member of technical staff”—also known as MTS in some circles—seems to be growing in popularity, and not just at OpenAI. A New York Times story this week cited an analysis by Stanford University researchers Nick Bloom and Gideon Slocum Moore, which looked at the rise of this job title at major AI companies. In December 2025, 39% of Anthropic employees used that job title to describe their current role on LinkedIn, along with 31% of the workforce at OpenAI and 26% at xAI, according to the Times. Over the last year, there’s been a clear shift: The use of “member of technical staff” has ticked up by 50% across employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Microsoft AI.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both framed this title as a way to collapse the distinction between researchers and engineers, putting them on equal footing rather than elevating researchers with a PhD like labs had done in the past. The term also appears to be an intentional callback, reviving a job title that was once widely used by the famed research center Bell Labs.
It’s not just the frontier labs that seem to be embracing this term. Some AI companies have adopted the terminology in their job listings, perhaps to project a certain image to applicants or as shorthand for the kind of talent they hope to attract.
On its face, “member of technical staff” may not appear to say much. “What’s distinctive about it is that it’s not distinctive at all,” says Elizabeth Eley, an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal.
But she argues the term conveys a clear message to prospective employees who are in the know: “I think it’s saying something,” she adds. “It is sending a signal: ‘You come and work here, and you’re part of this team that does this innovative, technical work. We don’t need job titles.’” (Eley also posits that it could be driven by a desire to stop using military-inspired terms like “forward deployed engineer,” especially as AI companies come under intense scrutiny.)
This title might seem like an equalizer, or a repudiation of the traditional org chart; it could also be a strategic move to limit visibility into an AI company’s operations. But the growing ubiquity of “member of technical staff” also fits within a broader trend of unconventional job titles that can be somewhat inscrutable to the general public.
In a recent paper, Eley delved into why companies use titles like “chief storyteller” and “happiness hero,” and how they can impact the hiring process. Sometimes, Eley says, unusual job titles stem from an actual need, when there’s no appropriate title for a particular job. In other instances, they might be more symbolic and effectively function as branding for a company.
Either way, there’s an impact on the type of workers who apply for the job. “It’s hard for just anyone to understand what it is—which I think, frankly, [employers] kind of want,” she says. “They want people to not really know exactly what the job title is. If you’re in the know, or you love the company, then you will apply.”
The term “member of technical staff” might also underscore something many employees instinctively recognize—that job titles can have little bearing on the actual work that they do. Often a title simply confers status and identity. “It’s like this cultural code for someone that works at an innovative AI company,” Eley says of the title. “So other places will start using it as well.”
