Spellbook, a company that makes AI software for lawyers, created a senior job in May called executive individual contributor. It gave the job to Jean-Michel Lemieux, a former chief technology officer of Shopify and Atlassian, and no team reports to him. He works alongside staff on the projects that matter most, across product, engineering, sales and internal systems. It arrives while companies are cutting layers of middle managers, and it answers the question that cutting raises: what should experienced senior people do when there is no team left for them to lead?
The old fix was a prize for a few people
Spellbook's reasoning is that in a company that builds software this fast, the slow part is deciding and coordinating, and a senior person who moves across the company removes that delay.
The idea of a senior job without a team is not new. IBM's Fellow title has existed since 1962 and is still the highest honor its technical staff can reach, but only four to nine people get it each year. That makes it a prize, not a career path. Spellbook's version is an ordinary working job, and it covers the whole business instead of one specialty.
AI is what lets a senior person work without a team
Think about what a senior manager does in a week, apart from making decisions. A large part of it is carrying information. A team lead reports what is late, the manager summarizes it for a director, and the director sends the decision back down. Each handoff exists because nobody could hold the whole picture in their head or read every system.
AI can read the order system, the support inbox and the weekly spreadsheet, write the summary, and draft the message back to the team. For example, an operations head at a regional distributor with six shift leads spends every Monday gathering what went wrong over the weekend. If AI has that overview ready before she arrives, she can spend the morning fixing the one supplier problem behind most of the late orders. If the gathering and passing takes a day and a half a week, that is about three months of working time a year.
What it means for your career
The skill this job needs is one senior people already have. Bosses use AI more than their staff because they already know how to hand over a task with clear instructions and check the result. An executive individual contributor does the same thing, but hands the work to AI instead of to a team.
The role will show up first where work already lives on a screen: software, law, consulting, finance. In a warehouse or a hospital, someone still has to run the shift, so team leads stay. The layer above them, whose job was carrying numbers upward and instructions downward, is the layer AI can take over, and the people in it will be asked to do something else. Within a few years I expect job ads for senior roles that list what the person will build or fix and say nothing about how many people they lead.
If your plan for the next promotion has been a bigger team, that is the change to prepare for. A bigger team used to be the proof of seniority. In a flatter company the proof is a problem you solved yourself, with AI doing the routine work, so keep a record of those.