What Is a Member of Technical Staff?

Here's something that should sound strange: a sitting CTO walked away from the C-suite to take a title that, on paper, sounds junior.

In April 2026, Workday's CTO traded his title to join Anthropic as a "Member of Technical Staff."

Not VP. Not Head of Engineering. Just "Member of Technical Staff."

So what is this title, and why does everyone suddenly want it?

So What Is It?

A Member of Technical Staff (MTS) is the standard engineering title at labs like Anthropic and OpenAI.

The key thing to understand: it is used across research, infrastructure, safety, and product, no matter how senior you are.

A new grad can be an MTS. A former CTO can be an MTS.

The title tells you almost nothing about what someone does or where they sit in the hierarchy. That is the whole point.

A Title With Deep Roots

The label is not new. It started at Bell Labs, the legendary research lab behind the transistor and so much of modern computing.

Here is the detail I love: even the president of Bell Labs would sometimes just call himself a Member of Technical Staff.

It signaled a culture where your expertise mattered more than your rank. That history is a big reason the title still carries weight today.

Why AI Labs Brought It Back

The revival is not an accident. It reflects how these companies want to work.

OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, says they did not want to bucket people into "researchers" and "engineers." On Alan Kay's advice, they borrowed the title from Xerox PARC.

The idea is a flat structure where everyone ships. No researchers sitting above engineers. No engineers treated as order-takers.

One shared title, one shared mission. It is now common at Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and many AI startups.

Why Senior Leaders Are "Trading Down"

The Workday CTO is not alone. Former CTOs from Instagram, You.com, and Adept all joined Anthropic as Members of Technical Staff too.

(I wrote more about this pattern in Why Are CTOs Becoming ICs Again?)

Why give up a C-suite title? A few reasons:

• The work pulls them in. Frontier AI is where they want to be, and the title gets out of the way.
• They want to build, not manage. MTS puts them back close to the actual work.
• The pay is strong. At top labs, this is not a step down in compensation.

When the work is exciting enough and the pay is right, the title on your business card stops mattering.

What This Really Signals

This is the part worth sitting with.

For a long time, status in tech came from your title. Moving up meant moving away from the work and into management.

The MTS revival flips that. The status symbol is shifting from your title to your impact.

In a flat "everyone builds" culture, you are measured by what you ship, not by how many people report to you.

That is a culture a lot of the best builders want to be in. It is also why a title that sounds junior has quietly become one of the most respected in tech.

The Takeaway

A "Member of Technical Staff" is not a junior role. It is a signal.

It says the company values what you build over where you sit. And in the AI era, that may be the most honest title there is.