Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
Why this particular step stalls There is a specific kind of frustration that shows up three or four years into a senior AI engineering role. You are good. Your reviews say so. You ship the hard things, you are the person the team routes the ambiguous work to, and when a launch is on fire at eleven at night you are on the call. And yet the conversation about the next level either does not happen, or happens in language so vague — "more impact", "more scope", "be more strategic" — that it is impossible to act on. Two things are usually going on, and it matters enormously which one you are dealing with, because the remedies are opposite. The first is structural. Staff slots are scarce in a way senior slots are not. One widely-shared 2026 practitioner essay put the ratio at roughly six senior…
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