Your Two-Line Positioning

The positioning line is the answer to "tell me about yourself", the top of your CV, your LinkedIn headline, and the first paragraph of any outreach. Written once, used everywhere.

Narrow beats broad. "Senior full-stack engineer with 8 years across various technologies" describes half a million people and is therefore invisible. "Frontend engineer who builds product surfaces on top of model APIs — streaming interfaces, evals for the features behind them, and the performance work that makes them feel fast" describes a much smaller set, and it's the set an AI company is searching for. The fear is that narrowing loses opportunities; in practice broad positioning loses all of them by being unmemorable.

Make it true and evidenced. Every claim in the line should map to something in your story bank. If you say you're strong on performance work, you need the story with the numbers.

Structure that works: what you do and at what level, the specific domain or capability, and one proof point. "Senior frontend engineer, 8 years, mostly React and TypeScript. The last two building LLM product surfaces — I shipped the streaming chat UI at X, cut p95 time-to-first-token by 60%, and built the eval harness the team still uses."

Include the direction you're heading, not just where you've been — it tells a hiring manager which role to consider you for. "I'm looking to go deeper on the product side of AI features rather than the infrastructure underneath them."

Say it out loud until it's 30 seconds. "Tell me about yourself" opens most calls, and a rambling chronological answer from 2016 onwards wastes the moment where attention is highest. Rehearse it; adjust one clause per company.

At the top of a search you're competing with hundreds of applicants who describe themselves identically, and the first filter is human, fast, and pattern-matching. A specific line is what makes someone read the second paragraph. It also focuses your own search — a clear line makes it obvious which roles to skip.

• Two sentences, reusable across CV, LinkedIn, outreach, and the opening of every call.
• Narrow deliberately; generic senior-engineer framing is invisible in a large pool.
• Every claim must be backed by a story with specifics — the line is a promise the loop will test.
• Include one concrete proof point with a number.
• State the direction you want, so people know which role to consider you for.
• Keep it to about 30 seconds spoken and rehearse it; it opens nearly every conversation.
• Adjust one clause per company rather than rewriting it each time.
• If it could describe most engineers you know, it isn't finished.