What The Heck Is A GTM Engineer

Today’s Role: GTM Engineer

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A GTM (Go-To-Market) Engineer is essentially an automation wizard with strong business acumen who sits at the intersection of revenue, growth, operations, and engineering.

Much of this expertise has historically sat under RevOps or Growth functions, but as tools and trends have evolved, a new dedicated role has emerged. As Jared Waxman, Co‑Founder of GTM Engineer School put it, "GTM Engineers are the Wright Brothers of revenue operations - using AI as their new vehicle to achieve what everyone thought was impossible, while their competitors are still trying to train faster horses."

These folks build scalable demo environments, automate onboarding, create workflows to deliver leads to the right teams, and connect tools across your stack so Sales, Marketing, and CS can run faster and smarter, and with less help from core product and engineering.

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Why This Role Matters

With new automations and AI tools popping up every day like fresh constellations in an ever-expanding universe, every person and function needs to consistently evaluate their intended outcomes and the time spent achieving them in order to focus on high‑value work and to free up bandwidth to imagine bigger possibilities and results.

While all of us now need to be automation savvy and excellent discerners of our time, we are not all automation experts, and that’s OK. Hiring one GTM focused automation expert can be a force multiplier for an entire GTM team to do more with less by building systems, automating manual steps, and unleashing speed‑to‑value.

Whether you’re running a PLG or enterprise model, your GTM team needs to move fast by analyzing data, personalizing demos, qualifying signals, and onboarding high-value users, all without waiting on product and eng. GTM Engineers make that possible.

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When to Hire One

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According to Brendan Short (via The Signal), if you’ve achieved product-market fit and your GTM playbook is working, whether you have 2 or 100+ reps, a GTM Engineer can help you automate and scale. He sees the common inflection point for a full-time hire to be around a rep headcount of 10. Most hires come between Series A and Series C and are particularly impactful in dev tools, API-first products, or infrastructure SaaS.

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What Great Looks Like

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• Background in engineering, sales engineering, technical operations, or DevOps with GTM exposure
• Familiarity with stacks like: Zapier, Clay, Segment, Postman, HubSpot, Salesforce
• Basic scripting and API experience; automation-first mindset
• Strategic thinker who understands funnels, ICPs, and GTM workflows
• Systems thinker who can spot and solve bottlenecks across teams
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and constantly evolving tooling

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“From a soft skills perspective, look for someone who is a systems thinker, has good critical thinking skills, is really curious, and who understands that tools are changing constantly” - Patrick Spychalski, The Kiln

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Pitfalls To Mind

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This role needs both technical chops and GTM fluency. Prioritizing tech skills at the expense of GTM acumen will undermine overall value. And since this is a revenue‑oriented function, variable comp makes sense.

There’s definitely a supply‑demand gap: lots of companies need this role, but the talent pool, especially with the exact GTM Engineer title, is small. People with the skills and aptitude are out there, you just need to know where to look. Focus on people with the right blend of experience and ability, even if they’ve never held the formal title.

Another potential option is up-skilling and promoting from within by investing in someone who is either in a GTM role now with high technical acumen or vice versa, and who is eager and hungry to learn.

No matter who you hire, enablement is paramount. This person needs budget, tooling, cross-functional collaboration, and clear cut goals and expectations.

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Interview Questions That Reveal the Real Thing

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1. Walk me through a time you built an end-to-end workflow that unblocked a go-to-market team. What problem were you solving and what was the outcome?
2. If our reps are spending too much time researching leads, how would you identify the root cause and solve it with automation?
3. Have you ever improved a process across sales and marketing that people didn’t realize was broken?
4. What GTM tools or systems are you most excited about right now, and why?

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Is This Role Here to Stay?

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Absolutely. The rise of AI tools, no-code automation, and PLG has created a massive need for builders who can integrate, automate, and accelerate go-to-market systems.

Hiring internally can work, but most successful hires have 4–6+ years of experience, technical curiosity, and systems-level thinking.

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Hiring a GTM Engineer?

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We’ve helped companies like Jasper, Carbonfuture, and Rutter hire high-performing, values-aligned talent across GTM, G&A, and R&D. If you’re scaling your team and are ready to invest in someone who will bring operational leverage, we’d love to help.

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Thanks for reading. If you found this useful, feel free to share it with a founder, operator, or hiring manager in your orbit.

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Until next time,

Alex

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