The AI era is elevating a flatter, broader “member of technical staff” role into one of the more prestigious jobs in tech.
In March, Anthropic hired Peter Bailis as a member of technical staff less than a year after he joined Workday as its chief technology officer. Workday’s president of product and technology, Gerrit Kazmaier, said at the time of hiring that Bailis would be part of the HR company’s initiative to go “all in” on AI.
Prior to the Workday post, Bailis was a VP at Google for about a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn.
“We’re grateful for Peter’s contributions and wish him the best in his next chapter,” a Workday spokesperson said in a statement. “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 move from Workday. Bailis did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Anthropic spokesperson said Bailis will be working on reinforcement learning engineering at the startup.
The MTS title is common at frontier labs — like Anthropic and OpenAI — and larger companies for technical hires across research and engineering. The title highlights a cross-functional and non-hierarchical structure. While the label doesn’t specify an executive-level position, it carries prestige and often comes with the promise of building new products.
Anthropic on its careers page says “engineers here do lots of research, and researchers do lots of engineering,” adding that engineers will “have as much input into Anthropic’s direction as anyone else.”
OpenAI president Greg Brockman similarly explained in 2023 that the AI startup did not want to “bucket people into researchers and engineers,” opting for the MTS title.
Mike Krieger was the cofounder and CTO of Instagram before he started a news aggregator app and then joined Anthropic as its chief product officer. Earlier this year, Krieger announced on X that he was shifting roles to a technical staff member of Anthropic’s Labs, which works on Claude Code.
A MTS role can also bring high pay.
In 2025, Business Insider reported, citing H-1B visa filings to the Department of Labor, that a member of technical staff at Anthropic can pay $300,000 to $405,000. At OpenAI, a member of technical staff could be paid between $210,000 to $530,000, according to the report.
The skyrocketing valuation of Anthropic also brings the prospect of minting multimillionaires through equity as the startup eyes a $380 billion post-money valuation.
The potential allure of the MTS role at a frontier AI lab comes as AI-native startups disrupt larger software companies.
In February, Anthropic’s rollout of Claude Cowork and industry-specific plugin tools triggered a stock sell-off in the software sector. The reaction was dubbed the SaaSpocalypse, reflecting fears that AI labs like Anthropic are making tools advanced enough to make companies dedicated to software services redundant.
