Job titles in tech are a strange language. Two people with the same title can do completely different jobs, and two people with completely different titles can spend their whole day in the same Slack channel fixing the same bug.

So here's a field glossary, written with love, by someone who has worn several of these hats, sometimes on the same afternoon. If you see yourself in here, that's the point. Everyone does.

The glossary

Junior Developer

Writes code that works, then spends twice as long finding out why it works. Asks "is this a stupid question?" before every question that turns out not to be. Has the most up-to-date knowledge of the framework docs on the team, because they actually read them.

Mid-Level Developer

Has stopped asking whether the question is stupid and started asking whether the requirement is. Can now estimate a task. The estimate is still wrong, but it's wrong with confidence.

Senior Developer

Writes less code than they used to and deletes more of it. Their most-used phrase is "it depends", immediately followed by a list of exactly what it depends on. Their second most-used phrase is "let's not build that yet".

Lead Developer

Spends the morning in meetings protecting the team from meetings. Codes in the afternoon, gets interrupted, codes again in the evening. Reviews more pull requests than they open.

Full-Stack Developer

Fluent in the database, the API, the frontend and the mobile app. Also the person who gets asked about the printer, because "you're good with computers". The stack is deeper than the title suggests.

Frontend Developer

Knows that "just centre it" is a three-part question. Has opinions on spacing that seem excessive until you see the screen without them. Tests on a real phone, which is why their bugs are found before yours.

Backend Developer

Their best work is invisible. Nobody thanks them for the payment that didn't go through twice or the report that loads in a second. When they're doing well, you never think about them.

DevOps Engineer

Turns "it works on my machine" into "it works on every machine". Has a terminal open at all times, including on holiday, "just in case". Considers a boring deploy the highest form of success.

QA Engineer

Enters a negative number into the quantity field on their first day. Finds the bug that only happens on Tuesdays in a specific time zone. Saves everyone, gets thanked by nobody, and is right about that one edge case again.

Software Architect

Draws boxes and arrows that will outlive several frameworks. The good ones still read the code and know exactly where the boxes don't match reality.

AI Engineer

The newest title on the list and the hardest to define. Some days it means training models. Most days it means writing prompts, validating JSON, adding timeouts and explaining to everyone why the AI feature needs a fallback.

"Rockstar" / "Ninja" / "Wizard"

A title found mainly in job adverts. In real life, the best engineers rarely describe themselves this way. They describe the problem they solved.

The joke has a point

Every entry above is a little exaggerated, but they share one honest truth: the title tells you very little about the work.

"Senior" at a five-person startup and "senior" at a large company can mean very different things. A "full-stack developer" at one place builds features end to end; at another, it means "we couldn't decide". Some teams have no title for the person who quietly owns monitoring, deploys and the weird legacy module, yet that person is holding a lot together.

So when you're comparing yourself to someone else's title, or reading one on a profile, look past the label:

• What do they own? Not "work on", but own: notice when it breaks, fix it, improve it.
• How big are the decisions they make? A function, a feature, a system, a direction.
• Who do they make better? Seniority shows up in other people's work too: the reviews, the docs, the junior who got unstuck.

Your turn

Every team has one role that's missing from this list. The person who knows where every password manager entry lives. The one who can explain the billing logic from memory.

What's the unofficial job title someone on your team deserves?