I'm not sure which statement is more correct.
John has been with the team since 2010 and is currently a senior researcher
OR
John has been with the team since 2010 and currently is a senior researcher
(Hint: John has been with the team for sometime now and has been promoted few times having a much senior title now)
Best Answer
Word Choice
The first hurdle in answering your question is to decide whether you should use the word at all:
One writer won’t even make that concession:
Another writer, however, urges the use of currently instead of presently :
This, I suppose, is substituting something merely bad for something worse.
Frequency and Usage
If presently doesn’t enter the mix and, disregarding Ms. Grant et al., you decide currently is the word for you, then the question of word order arises.
A Google NGram suggests that English speakers overwhelmingly prefer is currently to currently is:
An NGrab only measures frequency: it cannot tell you whether the collocation is ungrammatical or non-standard. What the NGram does show, however, is that even though the word first appeared in the 1570s, frequnt use of currently is remarkably current. Note the steep incline beginning around 1965.
I suspect that this more frequent usage goes hand in hand with the resume, taken from the French résumé as a replacement for the more discursive application letter, and the emergence of the trade paperback in the 50s and 60s with its obligatory bio on the back cover which informs the reader that the author “currently resides in the Hamptons.” If one were to subtract all the resume-like hits in Google Books, the frequency would likely return to what it was in the 1930s.
ESL “Rules”
Teachers of English as a foreign language often substitute frequency for grammar, i.e., since most people say x, then x is the rule. This is both convenient and efficient, for trying to explain how and when native speakers don’t follow the usual pattern, particularly in more complex sentences, is as hopeless as trying to explain baseball or cricket.
For instance, a German site proclaims
Aren’t those German quotes decorative? This rule is echoed by a site for Czech learners, while MyEnglishPages and CoLanguage, both international sites, restrict the rule to adverbs of frequency, as does this Polish site.
If your goal is to have students produce simple sentences such as the ones on the German site:
in which there is no reason to deviate from meat-and-potatoes word order, then such a rule is appropriate. The problem, of course, is that it’s demonstrably false, even for adverbs of frequency:
In the first two examples, the adverb precedes the verb because it is stressed: seldom doesn’t take its usual place because neither Billy nor the schoolteacher are able to spend much time at home, contrary to what one would expect. In the third example, the word order seems more like a stylistic choice. None, however, could be considered remotely ungrammatical.
In an elliptical construction, the adverb must come before the verb except in very informal speech:
And in indirect questions:
The usual word order can also be changed to eliminate ambiguity:
Using an adjective yields the rather ponderous her current major research interest. If the writer chooses not to begin the sentence with the adverb, which might give it too much weight, placing it after the verb could lead the reader to parse changing not as an adjective, but as a gerund, suggesting that she is the one doing the changing. Realizing that absurdity, the reader must reparse the sentence to figure out that family roles are changing instead.
Conclusion
So where does that leave you? With Alexis Grant, one might suggest a simple now. After all, why sound like every bio, book blurb, and resume on the planet? Either now or currently before the verb would stress the contrast to 2010, but no adverb can express what you’ve explained: that after a series of promotions he now occupies a much higher position. Adverbs can only modify the upward motion you want, not express it. In that case, a verb such as advanced (to the position of) or attained (the position of) might suit your purposes better.