# I keep rewriting my own job title

> I've changed the title on my own website four times this month: Technical Writer, then Knowledge Engineer, then back. I know exactly what I do. I just can't find the word for it. Here's what the back-and-forth was actually telling me.

_Published June 10, 2026 · https://marcioflorindo.com/i-keep-rewriting-my-job-title.html_

I've changed the title on my own website four times this month. Technical Writer. Then Knowledge Engineer. Then back. I rewrote my LinkedIn headline, sat with it a day, felt like I'd borrowed someone else's jacket, and changed it again.

It's a strange problem to have. I know what I do. I just can't find the word for it.

I've written before that [writing is the output, not the work](writing-is-the-output.html). This is still true. What I didn't get into is how it actually feels to be sure of the work and lost on what to call it.

For most of those five years, "technical writer" was close enough. I wrote docs for complicated products, and they had to be right. This is the part that never stopped being important. But somewhere along the way the job grew a second half. I started using AI to build the things around the writing: research workflows, a toolkit the rest of the team picked up, automation that turned jobs measured in weeks into jobs measured in days. The writing was still the writing. It just wasn't the whole job anymore, and "technical writer" only named the half you could see.

So I reached for a bigger word. Knowledge Engineer. A few writers I follow had started talking about this, and for about a week I felt good about the change because I finally had a title that pointed at the systems instead of the pages.

Then it curdled. First it started to feel like a coat two sizes too big, a claim I'd have to keep tugging straight. Then I looked up what Knowledge Engineer means to the people who actually hire for it. Ontologies. Knowledge graphs. Vector databases. Years of software engineering. I don't do any of that. I direct AI to build things; I'm not the one writing the code underneath it. Put "engineer" on my profile and I'd be walking into rooms where the first real question would end the conversation.

That was the click. The discomfort wasn't me being indecisive. It was me being right. One title undersold the work and the other oversold it, and all that flip-flopping was me ricocheting between job titles because the thing in the middle, the actual job, doesn't have a name yet that anyone would recognize.

The job I do doesn't have a settled name. The whole field is halfway through renaming itself, and there's a growing crowd of us caught in the gap: writers who turned into builders, people who learned to point AI at a problem instead of being flattened by it. Knowledge engineer. Information architect. Knowledge infrastructure. None of them fit, and the market hasn't picked one.

I could keep hunting for the perfect title. Instead I made a smaller, more honest call. I lead with the words people search for, Senior Technical Writer, and I let the work say the rest. That's how I get found. The work is how I get hired. The story isn't "I'm a Knowledge Engineer now." It's "I'm a technical writer who builds the systems behind the writing." If that needs a new name someday, the name can catch up to the work. I don't have to coin it in a headline.

I haven't made peace with it, if I'm honest. Some mornings the title still feels too small for what's under it. But I'd take being underestimated by a word people understand over being mistaken for something I'm not. And I'd rather keep doing work that has no name than pick a name and quietly stop doing the work.

If you're somewhere in here too, old title doesn't fit, new ones fit worse, no idea what to write in the box: I don't have your answer. I just wanted to say the confusion might not be yours to fix. The world is running late but the work is already real.