I Don’t Fit the Job Title. and That’s the Point: Making the Case for Integrators in a World Divided by Generalists and Specialists.
This article first appeared in my newsletter on Substack.
Who am I?"
“What do I do?”
“What job title fits me?
These questions are not new to me. Lately, they have been harder to ignore.
Scrolling through job boards feels like being sold a suit that was never designed for me. I am asked to choose between off-the-rack identities such as AI Engineer, Product Manager, or Transformation Lead. They feel close enough to be tempting, yet never quite right.
For a long time, I wondered if the problem was me. Whether I needed to shrink parts of myself to fit inside the box.
Now I am starting to think the problem is the box.
The lie of the job title
Officially, my title is Senior AI Innovation Manager. But the words rarely land. I usually fall back on something vague: “I map what’s happening in AI across the public sector.” It is easier to hide behind.
In reality, the work does not fit neatly into a title.
On any given day, I might design and implement AI pipelines. I design product roadmaps and drive MVPs to market. I lead cross-functional teams, set strategic priorities, and influence senior leaders on AI adoption and policy across departments.
In most organisations, this would be split across roles. Engineer. Product manager. Strategist. Researcher. Writer.
But the work does not arrive neatly labelled. It demands whatever role moves it forward.
Leading the AI Knowledge Hub has felt less like occupying a role and more like building something from scratch. It started as a form of solo intrapreneurship. Over time, we found product–market fit and scaled a team, mentored others, and shaped the strategic direction of the product across multiple departments.
More than a title, it was about creating and leading a system that delivered.
The generalist illusion
For a long time, I found comfort in calling myself a generalist.
But the more I reflect on it, the less useful it feels.
During my master’s in Munich, I felt like a generalist. Many of my peers specialised deeply in areas like NLP, computer vision, or robotics. I moved across subfields instead, following curiosity. Reinforcement learning, adversarial attacks, formal verification, I tried it all.
Yet to my earlier computer science peers, I would have looked like a specialist. Someone who had narrowed in on AI.
Depending on the room, I could look like a generalist or a specialist. Nothing about my skills had changed.
Which makes the generalist versus specialist debate feel incomplete. It tries to impose a fixed identity on something that is inherently relative.
Maybe being a specialist is not about the skills you have. Maybe it is just how you look next to everyone else.
Enter the integrator
The more I reflect on this, the more I think we are missing a way to describe the work itself.
The work I, and many others, actually do is integrative.
If a generalist is defined by the breadth of what they can do, an integrator is defined by the depth of what they can connect. It isn’t just about having a broad toolkit; it’s about mastering the connective tissue. Integrative work is the art of translation and leadership: turning technical insights into strategic decisions, guiding teams, and aligning stakeholders across the organisation. It’s the ability to see how a technical constraint in an AI pipeline creates friction for a user, which then requires a shift in broader organisational strategy.
The leverage is in the gaps.
As AI systems become better at narrow tasks, value shifts. It is no longer found just in building components but in stitching them together. The future belongs to those who can connect technical capability, product decisions, organisational context, and human behavior, while leading others to act on that connection.
In environments where the rules are constantly shifting, domain expertise is not enough. The only appreciating asset is the ability to adapt quickly, guide teams across domains, and make sense of ambiguity while influencing outcomes at scale.
Curiosity and fluidity are not soft skills. They are the work.
Boxes vs reality
I have often wondered if I am broken. But the discomfort I have felt does not seem entirely personal anymore.
Our systems are built for clarity. Defined roles, clean boundaries, predictable outputs. Titles make it easier to hire, evaluate, and manage.
But the work itself is becoming less predictable.
As AI handles more of the standardised tasks, what remains are the edge cases. Messy, cross-disciplinary problems that do not come with a manual. Problems that do not respect organisational charts.
And yet we still evaluate people as if they do.
Years of experience in a narrow lane. Performance against predefined scopes. The ability to pass structured tests.
These signals are neat. But they miss the point.
What matters more is the ability to navigate the unknown, guide teams through ambiguity, and deliver outcomes that align technical possibilities with organisational goals.
So who am I, then?
I am an integrator. A builder. A problem solver.
My career is not a sequence of roles. It is a portfolio of proof.
I have moved between academia, the private sector, and government, working across very different environments but following the same pattern.
In academia, working across Munich, Pisa, and Cambridge, I led research on safety and robustness in autonomous driving. In a startup spun out of DeepMind focused on energy optimisation in data centres, I pitched offline reinforcement learning to address operator distrust and led the effort to validate and implement the approach. While contracting, I built an AI function from scratch, led ML pipeline implementation to accelerate F1 analytics, and guided autonomous racing projects. I also authored the textbook for a university course on reinforcement learning, bridging theory with practice and giving back to the community.
In the public sector, I have continued that pattern. Leading cross-functional teams, breaking down silos, mentoring others, and delivering where the problems are least defined.
No matter the domain, the pattern of the integrator remains the same: step into ambiguity, synthesise the needs, spot the patterns, make connections across teams and stakeholders, and deliver results. This is work that inherently refuses to stay within the lines of a job description.
So no, I do not think I am broken. The system simply hasn’t evolved to match the reality of the work.
I no longer need a title to define me. I have the skills, the track record, and the autonomy to choose where to apply them. I am not interested in climbing a corporate ladder just for a shinier title. I want to climb the ladder to expand my circle of impact, influence strategy, and create environments where teams thrive.
The question for organisations is no longer, “How do we label people like this?”
It is: “How do we build environments where they actually want to stay?”
I am done looking for a better-fitting suit. I am interested in designing the whole damn wardrobe!
Do you feel like you’re shrinking yourself to fit a title, or have you found a way to build your own wardrobe? I’d love to hear how you describe the work you actually do in the comments.