If you’ve checked the LinkedIn page or a conference talk of any engineer at Anthropic, OpenAI etc., you’ve surely stumbled over their somewhat unusual job title ‘Member of Technical Staff (MTS)’. What’s the motivation to move on from the well-established ‘Software Engineer’?
I’ve heard some arguments towards removing the seniority from the title, but that’s a somewhat weak argument because (i) Google engineers for instance all share the base title ‘Software Engineer’ regardless of internal level, though they typically prefix it with their seniority (Senior, Staff, Principal), and (ii) even though it sounds fairly ridiculous, there is nothing fundamentally wrong about being a ‘Senior MTS’.
The term itself originated at Bell Labs to emphasize the collaboration of engineering and research and dissolve the engineer/researcher divide, and it is with that in mind that the frontier AI labs have adopted that term again. It indicates a position technical leaders of their fields can define with little worry about whether they are leaning more into the research, product, or engineering side. The title also signals individual contributor parity with management tracks – at Bell Labs an MTS could out-rank a director in influence, and that’s part of what the AI labs are trying to recreate.
It’s worth noting MTS isn’t unique to AI labs: Sun Microsystems, IBM Research, HP Labs, and VMware have all used the title, all places with strong research-engineering blending. And within the current AI frontier, the title has spread well beyond Anthropic and OpenAI to xAI, Mistral, Inflection, and others, which makes the cultural signal clearer: these labs are explicitly positioning themselves as research institutions, not product companies.
Lastly, they are very much making the connection to the Bell Labs of the 1940s through the 1980s, which was a world-class institution that attracted top talent like no technology company before.
Daniel Lenz 