How to write a member of technical staff resume
Member of Technical Staff is the deliberately flat title AI labs use for engineers and researchers alike, so a strong MTS resume ignores title-signaling and maximizes evidence density: one clear spike (training, inference, agents, product engineering) backed by artifacts — shipped systems, open-source work, benchmarks, publications — each with scale and ownership numbers (e.g. "Owned post-training data pipeline processing 2B tokens/week; two ablation findings adopted in the production recipe"). Labs read for slope and proof-of-work, not career-ladder titles.
What recruiters and ATS look for in a member of technical staff resume
Applying to MTS roles means applying to organizations that intentionally erased seniority titles — Anthropic, OpenAI, and many labs hire almost everyone technical as MTS — so the usual signaling (Senior, Staff, Lead) carries little weight and the resume must argue through work. What screens look for: a legible spike ("this person is exceptional at X"), evidence you ship fast at high quality, comfort with ambiguity, and public artifacts a reviewer can inspect — repos, evals, write-ups, papers. Tailor the spike to the team you're targeting rather than staying general; a focused MTS resume for inference reads very differently from one for agents, and generic AI enthusiasm reads as neither.
Section order: Summary (name your spike) → Experience (ownership + scale) → Open Source / Publications → Skills → Education.
ATS keywords for a member of technical staff resume
These are the keywords most member of technical staff job descriptions use as ATS-filter inputs. Include the ones you genuinely have evidence for in your Skills section.
Starter Skills section
A starting point for your Skills section. Prune to what you genuinely have evidence for.
Best action verbs for member of technical staff bullets
Lead every bullet with a strong, specific verb. For this role, the strongest openers are:
Example bullet points (before → after)
Three rewrites following the action-verb / quantified-outcome pattern. Replace the specifics with your own. Never invent numbers.
Member of Technical Staff resume FAQ
It is a deliberately flat title covering most technical roles at AI labs — engineers and researchers, junior through very senior, often share it. It signals the org values contribution over hierarchy. For applicants it means your resume must demonstrate level through scope, scale, and artifacts, because the title itself won't.
Pick the team's domain (inference, agents, post-training, product) and rebuild the resume around your spike in it: lead bullets, projects, and summary all pointing the same direction. Labs explicitly hire for spikes over well-roundedness, and a reviewer should identify yours within ten seconds.
Far less than most employers — they read for what you owned, at what scale, and what you can show. Keep your official titles for honesty, but spend the space on evidence: systems shipped, numbers moved, public work. A strong GitHub or published eval often does more than a Staff title.
Inspectable ones in the lab's domain: open-source tools with real adoption, reproduced or original benchmarks, technical write-ups showing reasoning quality, and papers where genuine. One excellent artifact linked prominently beats five repos of tutorials.
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