Zoho has more Members of Technical Staff than OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI combined

The New York Times ran a story on 27 September 2026 under the headline "Job Titles Are Out. Now We're All 'Members of the Technical Staff.'" OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI give that title to their engineers and researchers.

We searched for it in the 137 million LinkedIn profiles in our people data and found 43,894 profiles that use it. Zoho, the business software company from Chennai, has the most: 4,980. OpenAI has 1,137, Anthropic 481 and xAI 248. The three labs have 1,866 between them.

OpenAI comes seventh, behind Oracle, Salesforce, AMD, Broadcom and Nutanix. At Broadcom, 1,623 of the 1,712 profiles with the title still name VMware as the company. Anthropic comes 17th, after PayPal and Adobe, and xAI comes 28th.

AMD could argue with the chart. Its engineers often shorten the title, and 2,326 more AMD profiles say MTS, SMTS or PMTS. Counted that way, AMD has 5,174 and Zoho 5,090.

Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026. Profiles with no country are in the count but in neither country column.

Bengaluru has more than four times as many as San Francisco

53.5% of the 43,894 profiles with the title are in India and 34.9% in the United States. Bengaluru has 8,547. The biggest groups there work at Oracle (1,228), Salesforce (884), Nutanix (713) and Broadcom (672). Chennai has 2,943 and Hyderabad 2,080.

San Francisco has 1,915, and 443 of them work at OpenAI. 4,948 of Zoho's 4,980 are in India, 2,242 of them in Chennai.

The labs use one title, Oracle has five

At OpenAI, 1,134 of the 1,137 use the plain title. All 481 at Anthropic and all 248 at xAI do too.

Oracle and Salesforce build a career ladder out of the same words. At Oracle, 1,401 profiles say Senior Member of Technical Staff, 1,045 the plain title, 800 Principal, 279 Consulting and 51 Junior. Salesforce goes from Associate (263) through the plain title (771), Senior (1,145) and Lead (584) to Principal (192). Nutanix numbers its levels: Member of Technical Staff 2, 3 and 4.

OpenAI has taken the idea beyond engineering. 72 profiles there say Member of Recruiting Staff and 34 say Member of Design Staff. Zoho did the same for its managers: 503 profiles say Member of Leadership Staff.

At xAI, more profiles say AI Tutor (399) than Member of Technical Staff (248).

How we counted

• Data: our copy of 137,405,748 LinkedIn profiles, fetched in July and August 2026. One row is one profile.
• A profile counts when its title contains "Member of Technical Staff", "Member of the Technical Staff", "Member Technical Staff" or "Technical Staff Member", in any case, with or without a prefix such as Senior or Principal. Abbreviations such as MTS or SMTS and misspellings are left out, except in the AMD paragraph.
• The employer is the company domain on the profile. We scanned every profile for the title, then counted the named companies a second time through the company index. The two counts agree.
• These are LinkedIn profiles, not headcounts. People write their own titles, and our copy covers some companies better than others. 1,786 of the 7,346 OpenAI profiles in our copy have no title at all, so OpenAI's real number is higher.

The dataset below has every employer with 10 or more profiles with the title, the country and city counts, and each named company's title ladder.