Rewriting tech roles

Founders Associates are high-potential, junior-to-mid level generalists who work directly with founders, leveraging up their time and wearing many hats. The role took off from around 2022 onwards. It often includes operational and commercial work, and may include more (e.g. people & hiring, product...).

The title allows lots of flexibility in how and where to focus the role. Typical Founders Associate hires have a few years of experience in consulting, finance, corporates, or other startups. They often go on to become Chiefs of Staff (owning more critical strategic areas), functional leaders, or founders.

Originating at Palantir, these customer-facing engineers spend most of their time on implementation and deployment. The role has since been adopted by technical scaleups and AI labs, with an 800% increase in 2025.

Very often, FDEs are embedded with customers for a significant amount of their time, either on calls or on-site. They are focused on serving customer needs, usually product configuration and fixing bugs. They can pass back valuable feedback on things like new feature requests to product engineering teams.

Founding GTM replaces narrower SDR / AE titles at early-stage, high-growth startups. The title more accurately reflects a broader role – often spanning sales, partnerships, events, growth and more.

Most of these hires are brought in before GTM playbooks exist, or while these are being built. While they can come from a functional sales background, they are usually more generalist, and often come from other high-performing, customer-facing contexts, too.

Providing a technical approach to GTM systems-building and architecture, GTM engineers are masters of automation. They set up tooling to track key sales and customer metrics, generate leads, and increase conversion. They are often associated with PLG companies.

Closely associated with RevOps (revenue operations), these hires build scalable revenue engines. Unlike RevOps, these hires are being made earlier and earlier in a company's lifecycle, running growth experiments and A/B tests and building effective GTM funnels from the start.

Originating at Bell Labs in the 1960s, this was created as a flat-hierarchy title for technical staff. It has since been revived by AI labs, where it is primarily used, given their logos alone often carry enough prestige. Startups sometimes use this title now, too.

The title carries numerous useful traits, including egalitarianism, prestige (given its historic use for frontier researchers), flexibility (allowing its holders to take on and own multiple types of technical work), and privacy (keeping work confidential).

This role is roughly analogous to GTM engineering, but for talent teams. A talent person who focuses on building systems and automation, and leveraging AI, in order to boost sourcing, screening, recruitment processes and conversion through to hire.

This is a very new title with use increasing primarily in 2026. Much like GTM or growth engineers, this kind of hire may be "quota bearing" in terms of using the systems they build to achieve hiring goals, or they may support operators doing the work by significantly improving team efficiency and output.