Who does what on a team
The cast. Every engineering title sits at a layer of the application and a step of the release pipeline, and the titles that sound alike are separated by what the person does all day.
Lessons
- Who does what on an engineering team? The one guide to engineering titles: product roles, the frontend and backend split, mobile, DevOps and SRE, the data quartet, AI titles, and the seniority ladder over all of them.
- Who works on a software team? The cast before the taxonomy. Who decides what gets built, who decides how it looks, and who decides how it works.
- What does a backend engineer do all day, and is mobile a different search? The layers of the app become careers. Plus mobile as its own market, and iOS against Android.
- What is DevOps, and what is an SRE? The roles that own the pipeline and the machines, separated by who their customer is.
- Data scientist, data engineer, data analyst, ML engineer: what is the difference? Four positions on one pipeline. One diagram, four different searches.
- Is AI engineer a real job title? The title that appeared in two years, mapped onto the builds-and-uses line, with pool sizes instead of opinions.
- QA, security, staff, principal, tech lead: what do these engineering titles mean? Two more disciplines, then the vertical axis over every role in the module. The most-spent lesson in the intake station.
- What is a founding engineer, a forward deployed engineer, and a sales engineer? Titles that describe context and risk appetite rather than a layer.