New Species
31 new job titles nobody explained to you. Type your title, find out what you are, open the live roles at a16z speedrun startups. Free, no signup.
What this is
A field guide to 31 job titles that have appeared or changed meaning in the last few years — GTM Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineer, Member of Technical Staff, Deployment Strategist and the rest. Each one gets a plain-English translation of what the posting actually means, what the job actually involves, and a live count of how many are open right now.
Type your current job title on the page and it tells you which species you are, then opens every matching role. The matching runs entirely in your browser — the title you type is never sent anywhere.
This is a free resource by Role Trackr. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to a16z, a16z speedrun, or any company whose roles appear here. Company names, logos and trademarks belong to their respective owners. Live role data comes from the a16z speedrun talent network public API. Roles go out of date fast, so always check the official posting before you apply.
The species names, translations and the ENTRY score are Role Trackr’s editorial opinion, not careers advice. Want something corrected, updated or taken down? Email hello@roletrackr.com.
Newly named — these barely existed three years ago
#001 GTM Engineer
Category: GTM, ENGINEERING.
Translation: "we want a salesperson who can code, and we will not be paying two salaries."
The sales team's engineer. Enrichment pipelines, automations, outbound systems. You automated your own job before anyone asked.
#002 Forward Deployed Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "you will be on a plane."
Half implementation, half product, all context. Nests inside the customer’s building until the thing works.
#003 Member of Technical Staff
Category: ENGINEERING, RESEARCH.
Translation: "we don’t know what you’ll do yet and we’re okay with that."
Deliberately unnamed, deliberately unranked. Mostly sighted at frontier labs.
#004 Deployment Strategist
Category: GTM.
Translation: "customer success, but it went to the gym."
Owns whether the customer actually succeeds after signing. Carries a roadmap and a grudge.
#005 Applied AI Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "make the model behave in front of real users."
Evals over demos. Cares equally about the prompt and the p95.
#006 AI Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "did you learn this on nights and weekends? great, you’re hired."
Population exploded. Origin still debated. No two postings agree on what it means.
#007 Design Engineer
Category: DESIGN, ENGINEERING.
Translation: "we’re tired of the handoff."
Designs it and ships it. Has opinions about easing curves and bundle size, in that order.
#008 Product Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "please stop asking us what to build."
Talks to users, decides, builds. Allergic to tickets.
#009 Growth Engineer
Category: GTM, ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the funnel is now a codebase."
Knows their activation rate from memory. Ships things they will delete in a week.
#010 Talent Engineer
Category: OPS.
Translation: "recruiting, but with a build step."
Rare. Builds the net instead of chasing.
#011 Founding Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the equity is real and so is the scope."
Employee one through five. Appears only at the beginning.
Familiar, mutated — the name survived, the job didn't
#012 Solutions Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING, GTM.
Translation: "the engineer we bring when the buyer asks a real question."
Demos, POCs, security questionnaires. Closes the deal without owning the number.
#013 Revenue Operations
Category: OPS, GTM.
Translation: "someone has to own the CRM, and it isn’t going to be sales."
The plumbing under the forecast. First to know why the number is wrong.
#014 Developer Advocate
Category: GTM, ENGINEERING.
Translation: "we need developers to like us and ads don’t work on them."
Half docs, half conference hallway. Credibility is the entire job.
#015 Chief of Staff
Category: OPS.
Translation: "you’ll do the founder’s least favorite thing, weekly."
Scope is whatever is on fire. Two years of it, then you run something.
#016 Research Engineer
Category: RESEARCH, ENGINEERING.
Translation: "we need the paper to run."
Reproduces it, then makes it fast. Publishes sometimes.
#017 Machine Learning Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING, RESEARCH.
Translation: "the job that existed before the gold rush."
Data, training, serving. Still the deepest bench in the field.
#018 Security Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "we sold to an enterprise and now we have questions."
Threat models and SOC 2. Popular right after the first big logo lands.
#019 Founding Designer
Category: DESIGN.
Translation: "you are the design team, and also the brand."
Sets the whole visual language, then hires against it.
#020 Growth Hacker
Category: GTM.
Translation: "the title didn’t survive. the job did."
Almost never posted under this name anymore. The live sightings are all Growth Marketing.
Established — named long ago, still where most of the board is
#021 Backend Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the part of the product nobody screenshots."
Services, data, uptime.
#022 Frontend Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the part everybody screenshots."
Where the product is actually experienced.
#023 Full Stack Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "both, at a startup, for one salary."
The default shape of a startup engineer.
#024 Account Executive
Category: GTM.
Translation: "you carry a number."
Still the clearest job on the board.
#025 Customer Success
Category: GTM.
Translation: "retention, phrased kindly."
The most reachable door into tech that still pays well.
#026 Sales Development
Category: GTM.
Translation: "the first hundred no’s."
Where a lot of GTM careers start.
#027 Mechanical Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the hardware boom is real."
Defense, space, robotics, manufacturing.
#028 Electrical Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "the boom, but with a soldering iron."
Boards, harnesses, power.
#029 Embedded Engineer
Category: ENGINEERING.
Translation: "software, but it can catch fire."
The scarcest engineering skill on the board right now.
#030 Finance
Category: OPS.
Translation: "someone has to model the burn."
Every one of these companies eventually needs this.
#031 Legal
Category: OPS.
Translation: "the AI question is now a legal question."
Small function, growing fast.
Cryptids — roles at companies that will not say who they are
Some listings come from stealth companies: the role is visible, the employer is not. The page shows how many are open right now and lets you read every one of them.
How the numbers work
- Counting: only roles whose posted title genuinely matches the species are kept, because a keyword search on the board returns far more than it should. A trailing "+" means there were more pages than we walked.
- Rarity: quartiles across every species we have a verified live count for. Cards read "unranked" until enough counts have landed to rank against.
- Pay: the median midpoint of posted bands, annual USD only. Under eight posted bands we say so instead of inventing a number — only about a fifth of roles post a band at all.
- Entry: the one number that is our own editorial judgement, and it is labelled as such on every card. It estimates how reachable a role is without the exact background.