I’ve been sitting on this hypothesis for a while and I want to put it out there properly.
A lot of tech roles are merging. Not officially. In practice, quietly, in what people actually do from nine to five — and the industry hasn’t caught up to it yet.
Here’s what made me think about it. I have friends who are data scientists. Friends who are forward deployed engineers. Friends who are tech leads, solutions architects, implementation consultants. When I talk to them about their actual days the work is often functionally identical. Especially for the ones who are customer-facing, partner-facing, client-facing in some capacity. The consultant-adjacent roles.
Same skills. Same conversations. Same problems but different companies, different badges.
coincidence? I think not
What could be happening
AI is lowering the barrier to a set of tasks that used to be the clearest differentiators between roles. Writing code. Structuring data. Prototyping quickly. Translating a technical idea into something a client can see.
Teams that used to be organized like assembly lines with product managers writing specs, designers mocking things up, engineers implementing code — are now more condensed. Engineers are expected to think like product managers. Product managers are expected to prototype. Everyone is expected to build something. There is a expectation “we should all be builders”
When almost anyone can create an app, workflow, or prototype, the scarce resource is no longer just engineering capacity. It’s also judgment. Anthropic
And judgment which is the ability to understand a client’s actual problem, translate ambiguity into something buildable, know when to push back and when to ship — that’s not role-specific. It never was. It just used to live in fewer people because fewer people could actually execute on it.
Now the execution barrier is lower. So the distinction between who does what is murkier. And the job titles possibly have not gotten creative yet
The job hunting problem
This matters practically if you’ve ever been job hunting in tech and felt a specific kind of confusion “I genuinely don’t know if this role is what I do.” I had this exact conversation with a friend two weeks ago who is job hunting.
Technical roles that also demand business context — AI product managers, solutions architects etc appear among the most in-demand jobs heading into 2026. But the way companies title and describe those roles varies so widely that four identical jobs at two different companies might be called completely different things. Data scientist at one. Solutions engineer at another. Technical manager at a third. Google
If you’ve applied for something and thought “this is exactly my job” only to get screened out because your title didn’t match theirs this is that problem.
The “builder” shift
There’s a broader shift underneath.
With AI coding tools, engineers increasingly spend their days giving agents instructions in plain English and reviewing output. The expectation that everyone should be able to build something — a prototype, a workflow, a demo — is becoming a baseline.
The creator of Claude Code said in February 2026 that the title of software engineer is going to go away and just become “builder” or “product manager.” That’s a strong claim. But the direction is right.
A third category is emerging alongside traditional engineers and vibe coders: the “agentic engineer” — someone who has redefined the job of software development around directing AI agents, delegating nearly all programming work and focusing on higher-level work like defining what should be built and orchestrating agents to execute. GeekWire
That description could apply to a solutions architect. A forward deployed engineer. A data scientist who spends most of their time in front of clients. A tech lead who hasn’t written production code in six months.
The container changed.
What this means practically
A few things worth sitting with if this resonates:
Your title is not your career. The skills underneath it — translating complexity, building quickly, operating at the intersection of technical and business.
Titles are becoming increasingly arbitrary, especially at the customer-facing layer of the stack.
If you’re job hunting, search for what the job actually does, not what it’s called. Look at the day-to-day responsibilities. Ignore the badge. Two roles can look identical at the task level and have completely different names depending on the company’s history, org structure, and whatever a hiring manager decided to call it three years ago.
And if you’re feeling like your role is hard to explain — like the official description doesn’t really capture what you do — you’re probably not wrong. You might just be ahead of the language.
The titles are lagging. The work already moved.
— Wanjiko, Prior Context
Which title do you actually have, and what do you actually do? I’m genuinely curious whether this matches what you’re seeing. Reply or leave a comment — this one I’d love to hear from you on.
