Last week I saw a LinkedIn post looking for a “Forward Deployed AI Engineer”. Tell me if you’ve heard a more ridiculous sounding job title, I’ll wait. This week, it’s “GenAI Application Engineer.” What?

It’s the same job-title churn we’ve seen for a decade. You’re not looking for a new type of person. You’re looking for a Product Engineer who’s mastered new tools.

I get it – hype cycles demand new jargon, your VCs want buzzwords. “Product Engineer” sounds a little too plain. But while we’re busy inventing titles, we’re missing the actual problem: we still don’t know how to find and evaluate these people well.

Five years ago, a Product Engineer wired up React to Rails and deployed on Heroku. Today, that same person builds LLM workflows, writes evals more than unit tests, hooks up MCP tool calls, and spends more time context engineering than coding. Completely different stack, and yet the same instinct.

Great Product Engineers do not care for specific frameworks, languages, or techniques. And they certainly do not care for your new neon-decal title. They worship solving a problem well. They’ll use whatever gives them the most leverage to getting shit done.

How about, instead of trying to come up with a new persona, we focus our energies towards finding and interviewing this type of person well? How about we finally stop asking them to solve random coding puzzles? How about we give them real tickets to solve from our actual codebase, instead of made-up quizzes? How about we watch how they work with AI, instead of making them write an algorithm on a whiteboard?

The person who mastered full-stack web apps is the same person who now masters agentic workflows. Their talent isn’t knowing specific tech – it’s their drive to find the shortest path from problem to solution.

Anyway, if tomorrow I see something like “Holistic Prompt Stack Synergist,” on LinkedIn, I’m building a Chrome extension that replaces all these terms with two simple words: Product Engineer.

A quick hat tip: Like a lot of industry terms, the exact origin of “Product Engineer” is murky. Facebook was one of the earliest to build its engineering culture around the idea. The term was also heavily championed by leaders like Jean-Michel Lemieux (JML) during his time at Atlassian and later Shopify.