Member of technical staff: why AI labs use one job title

The title is most common at newer labs. Revelio’s data shows 75 percent of staff at Thinking Machines Lab hold it, compared with 30 percent at OpenAI and 33 percent at Anthropic, according to Wilkie-Rogers. He put the figure at about 50 percent at Reflection, another newer lab.

Older tech firms such as Oracle, Salesforce, Sandia, AMD and AT&T use it too, but with a difference.

“Almost all of them have some kind of seniority qualifier before it. At Oracle, you’ll see principal member of technical staff or senior or junior or whatever. And the AI labs really don’t do that. No one has that. They’re just member of technical staff,” Wilkie-Rogers said.

“From our data, we can see that people are getting hired out of internships, out of entry-level positions, and then out of mid-level or even director positions,” he said.

Why the labs favor a flat title

Wilkie-Rogers said he doesn’t know for certain why the label has caught on, but he speculated that culture has something to do with it. The labs are concentrated in San Francisco, he said, and tend to do many things in similar ways.