The AI period is elevating a flatter, broader “member of technical staff” position into one of the extra prestigious jobs in tech.
In March, Anthropic hired Peter Bailis as a member of technical employees lower than a 12 months after he joined Workday as its chief know-how officer. Workday’s president of product and know-how, Gerrit Kazmaier, stated at the time of hiring that Bailis can be half of the HR firm’s initiative to go “all in” on AI.
Prior to the Workday submit, Bailis was a VP at Google for a few 12 months and a half, based on his LinkedIn.
“We’re grateful for Peter’s contributions and wish him the best in his next chapter,” a Workday spokesperson stated in a press release. “We’re thrilled that Gabe Monroy has taken on the role of Chief Technology Officer at Workday, leading our next chapter of AI innovation.”
An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed Bailis’s transfer from Workday. Bailis didn’t instantly return a request for remark.
The Anthropic spokesperson stated Bailis shall be engaged on reinforcement studying engineering at the startup.
The MTS title is frequent at frontier labs — like Anthropic and OpenAI — and bigger corporations for technical hires throughout analysis and engineering. The title highlights a cross-functional and non-hierarchical structure. While the label does not specify an executive-level place, it carries status and infrequently comes with the promise of constructing new merchandise.
Anthropic on its careers web page says “engineers here do lots of research, and researchers do lots of engineering,” including that engineers will “have as much input into Anthropic’s direction as anyone else.”
OpenAI president Greg Brockman equally defined in 2023 that the AI startup didn’t need to “bucket people into researchers and engineers,” opting for the MTS title.
Mike Krieger was the cofounder and CTO of Instagram earlier than he began a information aggregator app after which joined Anthropic as its chief product officer. Earlier this 12 months, Krieger introduced on X that he was shifting roles to a technical employees member of Anthropic’s Labs, which works on Claude Code.
A MTS position can even deliver excessive pay.
In 2025, Business Insider reported, citing H-1B visa filings to the Department of Labor, {that a} member of technical staff at Anthropic pays $300,000 to $405,000. At OpenAI, a member of technical employees might be paid between $210,000 to $530,000, based on the report.
The skyrocketing valuation of Anthropic additionally brings the prospect of minting multimillionaires via fairness because the startup eyes a $380 billion post-money valuation.
The potential attract of the MTS position at a frontier AI lab comes as AI-native startups disrupt bigger software program corporations.
In February, Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Cowork and industry-specific plugin instruments triggered a stock sell-off within the software program sector. The response was dubbed the SaaSpocalypse, reflecting fears that AI labs like Anthropic are making instruments superior sufficient to make corporations devoted to software program companies redundant.
