Every so often in startupland, a new role emerges that makes a splash. A few years ago, every company was looking for a chief of staff. Now, with companies increasingly adopting AI, startups are hiring for more new roles — among them, the go-to-market (GTM) engineer.
The role was coined in 2023 by Clay, an American data enrichment and automation platform which yesterday raised a $100m Series C round at a $3.1bn valuation. Since then companies like Cursor, Lovable, Notion and Webflow have all hired at least one. According to Clay data, there have been over 400 GTM engineer jobs posted in the last four and a half months alone.
From conversations I’ve been having, there are two reasons for this.
One is that former sales tactics that worked a decade ago no longer work. As customers’ inboxes are flooded with impersonal cold emails,it’s getting harder to capture attention with witty subject lines.
The second is that companies are realising the benefits of using AI tools to automate tasks across the sales function. For example, sellers no longer need to spend hours researching companies to contact when AI can research thousands of them in seconds.
No-code tools have also made it possible for companies to build tools themselves to serve their particular business needs — which is where the GTM engineer comes in.
What is a GTM engineer?
GTM engineers essentially build systems to help sales, growth and customer success teams work more efficiently and reach their revenue goals. They identify problems in these functions and use AI tools to solve them — inventing new workflows and automating tasks like lead-finding, account research and demand generation.
GTM engineers are technical people literate in AI tooling who “want to create things,” says Paul Staite, head of demand generation at e-commerce payments fintech Primer. The role can make a 100-person company operate like a 1,000 person organisation, he says, smoothing out efficiencies across the funnel and “connecting the dots” between marketing, sales and operations.
Examples of tasks a GTM engineer might do include:
Enrich data on inbound sales leads.
- Often, when potential customers enter a company’s system (for example, by filling out a form), sellers only get their email address. That leaves reps scrambling to gather more information and context before reaching out.
- A GTM engineer might solve that by setting up a tool like Clay to automate that information retrieval for them, finding the company’s or person’s LinkedIn account, their website and a description of the business, giving the seller more context to start a conversation with a buyer. Clay can also analyse the data for the seller, helping them determine if it’s a good lead to pursue or not.
Generate new leads.
- Maurits Wondergem, whose company WonderSales offers GTM engineering as a service, says a GTM engineer can set up a workflow using a string of AI tools to monitor social media platforms, compile a list of people who are talking about the thing you are selling and then email them automatically. A few years ago, a task like that may have needed a team of business development representatives (BDRs) to do it manually.
- “Instead of the spray and pray approach of emailing 10k people and hoping for the best, you can really create targeted campaigns and try to get that dialogue with customers. That’s the whole part of a GTM engineer, it really supports the people that actually do the (sales) meetings,” says Wondergem.
From looking at Clay’s job board, there are lots of different types of GTM engineering roles emerging, at least among US companies. They include a sales-led GTM engineer, whose responsibilities include guiding potential customers through consultative sales discussions and building workflows and tables tailored to customer challenges.
There’s also a GTM engineer focused on operations. The role is responsible for connecting all go-to-market tools into one stack and managing it as the company scales, and working with sales and customer teams to create technical solutions for certain business needs.
The role can be quite flexible and suited to the particular needs of the business. As Wondergem puts it: “what a company needs is what a GTM becomes.”
Where do they sit in the organisation?
Different companies have different ideas about where the GTM engineer sits in an organisation. As the role is so nascent in Europe, it seems there isn’t a clear idea about which function GTM engineers belong to — or whether it’s a function itself.
Staite says GTM engineers have to sit in operations, as that function has “ownership of processes” and is very close to analytics: “you have to be able to be aware of the gaps that you want to fill, like, where can I be more efficient? Where can I increase conversions down the funnel? Where can I make the biggest impact?”
Dan Batchelor, VP of marketing at API management platform Gravitee, who recently hired the company’s first GTM engineer, says the role usually sits in the marketing department.
Wondergem, on the other hand, says that GTM engineers sit somewhere “in the middle” of an organisation. “It’s really almost like a CRM system, right? It’s always in the middle of an organisation, everybody taps into it. A GTM engineer is the same because he or she can connect the dots,” says Wondergem. “That’s the whole beauty of it. It’s not like a one singular department thing.”
What do you need to look for in a candidate?
GTM engineers don’t have to be experienced engineers, but they do need to have technical understanding of “how data flows and how systems plug together,” says Batchelor.
They also need to have a solid understanding of AI tools like Zapier, Clay and N8n and know how to work with LLMs.
Staite says he would look for basic coding skills and an ability to use Javascript, as well as familiarity with prompts. Additional qualities include being process-driven and proficiency with data analytics.
GTM engineers also need to be astute problem solvers. As they’re building a lot of tools themselves, it’s their responsibility to fix things if they break. “You need someone to be quite diligent and create (a tool) and test it and test it and test it and then release it. And then when they do release it, have the things in place that if there is an error, they're the first ones who know about it and understand how to solve a problem,” says Staite.
Given that all companies are still learning how to use AI tools and embed them into their organisations, it’s not possible to find a candidate with years of experience in this area, so the GTM engineer can be an entry-level role.
The main thing, says Staite and Batchelor, is that they have some experience in playing around with AI tools, are hungry and eager to learn. (Clay has a dedicated article on how to hire a GTM engineer here.)
What are salaries like?
Salary benchmarks for GTM engineers in Europe currently don’t exist as there isn’t yet enough data.
Clay offers GTM engineer salaries of $140k-200k for US-based employees.
Batchelor says he would currently pay a European GTM engineer approximately £90k ($150k).
“As people realise what a good GTM engineer can do […] I think they’re going to command higher rates when you factor in what they actually bring to the business,” he says, given they offer a “double whammy” of making things more efficient and saving money, while generating more sales pipelines.
“I would pay a lot, and I’ll probably have to pay a lot more in the future to get good ones. It’s my belief this will be a core role going forward”
When is the right time to hire one?
The GTM engineer isn’t a silver bullet to solve a startup’s go-to-market problems, and a startup has to have certain structures in place before bringing someone in full-time.
Staite says the ideal time to bring in a GTM engineer is when the company:
- Has defined their ideal customer profile (ICP), the type of customer that will become a valuable, long-term customer for the business. (Otherwise you’re wasting a lot of time not knowing who you’re targeting)
- Has good sales and marketing alignment. (There’s clear goals outlined of what the business is working towards)
- Has a solid operational foundation — with basic CRM hygiene, foundational tools and data integrations already in place. Otherwise, what does a GTM engineer have to work with?
Batchelor thinks a company may not have a need for a GTM engineer in the very early stages. The role would be more fitting for a Series A company (and above) that has already established product-market fit and is looking to ramp up “outbound” — where a company contacts potential buyers. A GTM engineer could then help run outbound email, test different messaging and assess different signals (signs of potential customer interest.)
