Funny job titles and the jobs behind them

The job title generator's word lists

Each title takes one word from each list: 18 levels, 30 departments and 28 nouns, which makes 15,120 titles.

Weird job titles that are real

Every title below was used for real, and one of them belongs to a cat.

In our real or fake job titles game, they’re mixed in with fakes we wrote, and you guess which ones are real.

• Security Princess. Parisa Tabriz, who joined Google in 2007. She put it on her business card when she went to a conference in Tokyo.
• Jolly Good Fellow. Chade-Meng Tan at Google, until he left in 2015.
• Digital Prophet. What David Shing called himself at AOL from 2011.
• Technoking of Tesla. Elon Musk gave himself the title in a 2021 filing with the SEC. The same filing made finance chief Zach Kirkhorn Master of Coin.
• Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Larry the cat, at 10 Downing Street since 2011.
• Director of Rodent Mitigation. Kathleen Corradi became New York City’s first in April 2023. Mayor Eric Adams appointed her.
• Chief Heat Officer. A job Miami-Dade County created in 2021. The county says it was the world’s first.
• Night Mayor. Amsterdam elected its first in 2003.
• Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence. James Mickens at Microsoft Research.
• Chief Vibes Officer. Troye Sivan for Smirnoff in 2024, though the announcement says it “is not a real title”.
• Chief Tasting Officer. An honorary title from a 2026 Wendy’s contest with a $100,000 prize.
• Sandwich Artist. The crew job on Subway’s careers site.
• Tax Wrangler. A department on Automattic’s job board, listed next to Fraud Wrangler. Our generator took the word Wrangler from there.
• Chief Evangelist. Guy Kawasaki’s title at Canva from 2014, and where the Evangelist in our generator comes from.

Job-ad titles that mean extra work

A job ad that asks for a rockstar, a ninja, a wizard or a unicorn is telling you about the workload. The rockstar does everything well on one salary, and the ninja does the same without making a fuss. Call yourself an Excel wizard and every broken spreadsheet in the building lands on your desk. The unicorn is one hire with every skill on the list.

Among the corporate buzzwords in the same ad, “fast-paced” means there’s more work than people.

Our generator’s versions are more honest. Its Ninja quietly fixes things, and its Rockstar breaks them, loudly.

Titles that don’t match the job

Some people have two titles, one on their Teams profile and another on payroll. Others have none, because the last reorg forgot them.

In Reorg, HR shuffles desks labeled with made-up titles such as VP of Synergy, and you follow the one your manager sits at.

A title for your real job

54% of US workers say a job title affects whether they accept an offer. For your own title, use the plain name people search for, such as accountant, and the level that matches your pay. A grander title doesn’t always come with more money. In Pay Grade, you get two job ads and guess which one pays more.

When someone announces a grander title on LinkedIn, our LinkedIn speak translator turns the post back into plain English. For your first video call with a new title, put one of our Zoom backgrounds for work calls behind you.