The guide to becoming a GTM engineer

Why GTM engineering is becoming one of the most popular startup roles

TL;DR: If you are looking for a job, consider becoming a “GTM Engineer.” GTM engineers are responsible for building systems that drive revenue. They can be responsible for a level of impact that previously would’ve taken far more people (and time). We are seeing more and more startups augment their sales and marketing teams with GTM engineers—and we think this trend will continue to grow.

We often hear from people who are asking for career advice. Or who are looking for jobs in tech.

If you find yourself in this position, this essay is for you. While it is probably impossible to give general advice that is perfect for everyone, there are a few important things that we think you should know if you are wondering what to do with your career.

The first is that it’s much easier to get hired, and to stay hired, if you choose a job at which you can directly improve top-line revenue. A job where you can point to a specific project you built last year that made the company $1M. It’s hard to be more closely aligned with the CEO’s priorities than to be able to say, without any doubts, I literally made our company money and here is proof.

People who can do these jobs well tend to be in (very) high demand.

It’s also smart to get in early on a skillset that is becoming increasingly demanded. It’s even better if you can become one of the best people in the world at that skillset. Then you might be in really high demand.

This raises an important question: What should you learn to be good at?

Ten years ago, someone may have told you to become a software engineer. That may still be helpful advice. But the world is changing, and new roles—many of them ushered in by AI—are cropping up. So what’s the next big thing? What is the revenue-generating skillset that, if you learn now, will give you a lot of leverage for getting a job in tech over the next few years? Only the future knows for sure.

But here’s one guess: go-to-market engineers (GTMEs). If you are looking for a job or thinking about changing your career, we think that you could consider picking up the GTM skillset. We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do know that demand for GTM engineers is on the rise. More and more startups are hiring for people with a GTM engineering skillset: creative, savvy, full-stack builders who create systems that drive revenue. We think that this trend will continue to grow.

Below is a guide to learning a GTM engineer’s skillset. We’ll start with the most basic question: what does it actually mean to be a GTM engineer?

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It is hard to write about GTM engineering without mentioning the company that coined the term: Clay. And you probably won’t meet a GTM engineer who doesn’t know about Clay.

Clay formulated "GTM engineering" in 2023 in an internal Slack discussion about how to describe the AI-meets-automation-meets-GTM wizardry that their team was doing.

Since then, of course, GTM engineering has taken on a life of its own. Many startups are hiring for them and, if our bet is right, the trend will only continue to grow. If you are planning on becoming a GTM engineer, there is hardly a better place to start than Clay: a tool that is so good at putting together useful data that it almost feels magical. (It isn’t. It’s just great software.)

Thanks to Clay for partnering with us on this piece.

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What is a GTM engineer, and why become one?

Most new technologies usher in new kinds of jobs. The printing press unlocked jobs like typesetters and proofreaders. The assembly line led to new kinds of factory work. The airplane created pilots.

So what has ushered in GTM engineers? Well, it’s worth examining recent history.

Almost every successful company needs to grow. And at VC-backed startups, the type of companies at which most GTM engineers currently work, the pressure to grow fast is especially intense.

For a while, there was something resembling a playbook for these companies: build an effective Go-To-Market (GTM) organization by hiring growth marketers, growth engineers, revenue operations, marketing operations, and so on. These people used a mix of creativity, manual work, and software to execute on their best growth ideas. And, for the most part, it worked. It still works.

But over the past few years, something big has changed: go-to market software has become more powerful at an almost unbelievable pace. We now have LLMs, like ChatGPT and Claude—and the wave of tools enabled by them. We have more software that tracks data and intent. We have software like Clay, which can in seconds dig up piles of useful data that would have taken days of manual searching to find. Like Outreach, which can automate prospecting and increase the effectiveness of sales. Like 6sense, which can track buying signals across billions of data points. And so many more.

This new software unlocks new potential for growth. It provides massive leverage to the right people. One individual can now be responsible for the revenue impact that used to take a team of ten. Savvy, creative people can use the tools at their disposal to identify problems and build scalable systems that drive revenue. These people are called GTM engineers.

Take cold email, for example. It’s long been one of the default ways for certain kinds of tech companies to drive growth, and it’s a classic problem for GTM engineers to solve. That’s because, while it has the potential to drive asymmetrically positive growth, it has also been historically held back by manual work.

If 10 years ago your goal had been to send effective, personalized cold emails to 50,000 people, you would have had to summon a small army in order to get it done in any reasonable timeframe. You would have had to put together the list of every individual and find their email. Then you would have needed to research each one to find relevant personalized information. Then you’d have needed to manually write and send the emails, monitor the replies, and handle the email back-and-forths all the way until you could have (finally!) sent the potential customer to a call with a sales rep. This sort of initiative tended to involve many people from around the GTM org, all putting in many hours of tedious labor.

Today, things are different. In the span of a weekend, a single GTM engineer with a handful of AI tools could build the campaign we described above. They could:

• Come up with the strategy for a winning cold email campaign.

• Pop that criteria into Clay, build a list of people, and enrich that list with data.

• Use that data to automatically craft personalized emails with AI.

• Pipe that over to a tool like Smartlead or Instantly, which sends the emails.

• Set up automatic response triggers based on what leads say.

  • E.g. if they’re interested, have a message to set up a demo

  • E.g. if they have a question, have it get answered

  • E.g. if they say not interested, you could have counters for that

If the GTM engineer wanted to, they could automate the whole thing end-to-end. A meeting machine that books calls for your sales org without anyone, besides the GTME, doing much of anything.

Cold outbound is just one (quite common) example. GTM engineers often work on different projects at different companies—the common denominator being that they’re building go-to-market systems that generate revenue for the company.

In other words, GTM engineer is not just a job title (it can be that, too) but a skillset that can make you broadly useful in a number of rules. Data science may be one good comparison. Having a skillset in data science makes you useful for a number of roles, not just jobs titled Data Scientist (though it of course can make you a great fit for the Data Scientist role as well).

With this in mind, “GTM Engineer” is not always the job you will be applying for if you’d like to be a GTM Engineer. Some companies (like OpenAI and Clay) are fully aware of the term and apply it liberally. But other companies don’t. While there are currently quite a few jobs on LinkedIn titled ‘GTM Engineer’, the number of job postings that ask for GTM engineer skillsets are in the 1000s.

If you want to do GTM engineering work, you should be looking for jobs where you are being asked to (1) build systems that (2) drive revenue somehow, (3) most likely with the use of LLMs and AI-powered tools, (4) probably through creative, hack-y, savvy means. Jobs where you are a full-stack growth builder.

Is this a bit broad? Yes. But that’s good news if you’re looking for a GTM engineer job. At Clay, for example, previous job titles for GTM engineers include: investor, founder, structural engineer, biomedical engineer, software engineer, product manager, and growth marketer. While the term ‘agency’ has become something of a meme in the tech community, being a good GTM engineer is a lot about having agency; being creative and resourceful. It also, of course, asks you to know a thing or two about GTM.

Becoming an effective GTM engineer

Anyone can go create an account at Clay or run some experiments with Claude. The barrier to entry to doing GTM-engineer-like things is rather low. So how do you become a real, effective GTM engineer? If you are looking for a job, the answer is simple: learn how to build systems that actually drive revenue—and learn how to do so more effectively than anyone who might be on a traditional GTM team.

One good way you can go about doing that is to gain a deeper understanding of what companies are asking GTM engineers to do. What are you going to be asked about in an interview? What are they going to say your goals are for the first 90 days on the job?

We (using some of the tools a GTM engineer might use!) looked at every single job on LinkedIn as of this writing with the title ‘GTM engineer’. (Reminder that this is far from the total number of jobs that use a GTM engineer’s skillset). Here are the five most common buckets of work they were asking for:

For some more granular examples, you may also be asked to…

• Build tools that salespeople use to create quotes way faster

• Identify where sales processes get stuck and fix them

• Fix lead routing so good leads get to the right person

• Make CRMs fill themselves from call recordings

• Automated follow-up emails after someone has called a lead

• Build tools that make customer support agents’ lives easier (automations, etc.)

• There are 1000s of examples. You could even ask AI for more examples!

You may have intuited by now that there is no one definitive list of things that GTM engineers have to do at every company; your workload as a GTME lives downstream of the answer to the question ‘what ways can we effectively drive revenue for the company?’, and that answer tends to change by company. The goal of providing you with these examples is so that you can build a clearer mental image, or feeling, of the kinds of work you may want to start practicing.

There are some common-denominator skillsets that apply to most GTM engineers.

• Systems thinking: In the past, many marketing roles tended to be more siloed. This meant you didn’t have to apply systems thinking quite as much—your job could have started and ended with some niche slice of data within the CRM. But as a GTME, you should be able to visualize GTM as one massive system with thousands of inputs and outputs. And this thinking should impact the way you design revenue-generating systems that, ideally, complement each other.

• Learning new tools fast: Lots of GTM engineering involves learning new tools quickly. This plays to your advantage if you’re new to the field—a lot of the tools that GTMEs use today did not even exist a few years ago. You’re not two decades behind.

• Understanding customers: Because so much of your work involves identifying, selling to, and closing customers, you should be able to deeply understand how customers think. This is similar to the skillset that a great salesperson or account executive might have. You should be able to figure out—for any company!—what kind of people their customers are and what will be effective.

• Copywriting: Most, or at least many, GTM engineering projects involve writing copy. If you want to be a GTME, you may want to become at least somewhat familiar with copywriting principles. As a heuristic: if someone asked you to write an effective cold email, you should be able to write one. The same goes for landing pages, advertising copy, and similar.

• Software engineering: The existence and continual improvement of LLMs, along with a slew of no-code GTM tools, means that you probably do not have to be an incredible coder in order to be a GTM engineer. But it certainly might help. Clay told us that one thing they look for when hiring GTM engineers is for “technical-minded people”.

There is no amount of words we can write that will magically make you good at all of these things. Learning these skillsets takes time, and you will (in true GTME fashion) need to exercise your own agency and self-initiative to make yourself a competent GTM engineer.

If you are wondering where you start, though, there is one path we can recommend: learn the tools.

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If you asked 100 GTM engineers to name the 1 tool that you should learn first, most of them would probably tell you to go learn how to use Clay. That's because Clay has built an incredibly powerful tool that can, in seconds, do things with data that would have taken weeks of manual work otherwise.

A few examples: Clay's AI agents can detect when companies get SOC2 compliance, generate thousands of personalized landing pages, or trigger expansion campaigns when multiple users from the same company join a product.

Clay can do a lot. Describing it all would take a separate essay. And it's better they do the talking, anyway. Read some of the pieces over at Clay University to get started learning the tool.

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Learning the tools

The fact that so many of the most useful tools for GTM engineers are new is great news if you aren’t yet a GTM engineer. It means the burden of knowledge is lower, and it may not take you much time to catch up to—or one day, surpass—a lot of the people who are currently GTM engineering.

This isn’t software engineering, where you may have to spend years learning to code just to become competent. If you want to become a GTM engineer, you may be able to start by simply getting really good at a few tools.

There are two things to say about learning the tools: first is how you learn them and second is what you learn. So, how do you learn the tools that GTM engineers use?

You could (1) identify a tool and then (2) watch a lot of YouTube videos, read free courses online, check out the product education from the company itself, and read online discussions. That’s one structured way to learn a tool, and it may end up working for you. (Lots of the YouTube videos are great!)

But here’s another method: learn the tools by solving real problems.

In other words, work downstream. First, identify some kind of problem you want to solve; some system you want to build. Then figure out what tools you will need to make it happen, and learn the tools as you go. You can think of it a bit like learning a language—you could read all the textbooks first, but many people find it more helpful to simply spend time in another country and fully immerse themselves.

The benefit of learning GTM tools in this way is that you are effectively running a simulation of what you will end up doing if you get hired as a GTM engineer. What should you build? That’s up to you.

• You could invent a problem for a hypothetical company.

• You could build a system that solves a real problem you have (e.g. if you are looking for GTM engineering jobs, you could build systems that scrape job boards, find the right jobs, filter based on your criteria, send personalized outbound to hiring managers, etc).

• You could pretend you are actually working for a company—pick one you’d like to work at—and solve a problem you imagine they have. Build a system that would drive them revenue! You could even share it with them as a way to stand out.

We suspect that, as you go through this process, the second piece—the what—will become clear. When you need a tool to find and enrich leads or to orchestrate GTM workflows, you’ll discover Clay. When you need a tool to automate your email sending and track results, you’ll discover one of the many email sequencers available. One of the nice things about solving real problems is that it forces you to find real, effective solutions.

But, if you feel stuck, we suggest learning the latest and best tools in:

• Data enrichment

• CRM and sales automation

• Data analysis

• Customer engagement and outreach

• Project management

• LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT)

Learning the great tools in these categories will generally get you off to a good start. Of course, learning what the “best” tools are is also a byproduct of you learning the tools. As you become a more competent GTM engineer and build better systems, you will start to understand what makes Tool A better than Tool B, and you can form your own opinions (as opposed to just listening to people online).

If at any point during this process you have questions that are difficult to answer, you could also try reaching out to “professional” GTM engineers. You could also look for interviews and writing from GTM engineers online, like here on the gtm engineer Substack. People in new fields like this one are often open to sharing and may have useful information for you. To increase your chances of a successful reply, you could spend time learning about what makes a good email for humans.

Getting in touch with companies

There will, hopefully, come a point at which you decide you’d like to work for a company as a GTM engineer. You feel competent with the tools. You think you could start building systems that drive revenue—and perhaps you’ve already done so as you’ve been learning the tools.

What now? How do you get hired?

Of course, you could do the standard thing, type “GTM engineer” into LinkedIn, and send over your resume for the jobs that look interesting. And maybe you should do that, if only as a just-in-case measure. But that’s far from your only path to getting hired as a GTM engineer—and, in the true spirit of the job, there are probably more creative ways you could drive revenue (for yourself, by getting hired).

It may help to remind yourself that most tech companies—and many non-tech companies—need GTMEs, regardless of whether they’re using that term or not (the term is relatively new). In theory, you could reach out to any company that looks interesting to you. And you could follow the steps here if you need some guidance on how to reach out and what to say. So that’s one approach: simply email every company that looks interesting to you and pitch them on you working there as a GTM engineer.

You may be more likely to find success if you reach out to companies that are actively hiring, though. Ideally they are hiring for GTM roles, and even more ideally they are specifically hiring for GTM engineering roles. These companies have a strong understanding of their need for GTM people and, if they are hiring for GTM engineers, they actually know they need somebody with your skillset.

As for how to find those roles, beyond LinkedIn?

• Look on Next Play and other job boards

• Join communities (again, like Next Play) where you may learn about opportunities

• Look at case studies to find out which companies are GTM engineering

  • You can look at case studies that GTM engineering tools write about their customers—the customers that are in those case studies are probably doing some GTM engineering

  • You can look at blog posts that companies publish about their own growth

You can also build your own systems to identify open roles. You are the GTM engineer, after all :)

Once you’ve identified companies you’d like to work at, you’ll likely want to send them a message—even if you’re already sending in a job application. Who you send that message to will vary by company. If it’s a small (<50-person) company, you may want to email the founder and/or CEO. If it’s a larger company, do your best work to guess who at the company might be hiring for the role (like the Head of Growth).

When you finally send a message, keep a few things in mind.

Come up with a plan about what you might do when you work there. They may already have ideas around what they’d like you to do—but it’s always a good thing to have ideas of their own. They might like them. And even if they don’t, it’s generally impressive that you had ideas.

When you send your cold messages, focus your writing about how you think you can help them drive revenue. Don’t drone on about how you’ve spent a year learning GTM tools. What really matters is how you can help them. Emphasis on the them.

Show, don’t tell (when possible). Don’t just talk a big game. Show them past projects. Build them a tool. Get them to agree to a short work trial so you can drive real value for them.

GTM engineering is a relatively new skillset. It’s a new role. Between the time you read this and the time you speak with a company about them hiring you as a GTME, the way people define the role may shift. New, better tools may come out. But if you keep the primary goal—building systems that drive revenue—as your north star, you will likely be well-positioned to work in a field that seems likely to continue growing as technology improves.

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Becoming a GTM engineer is not quite like becoming a software engineer, or a writer. You can do those jobs on a blank sheet of paper. A lot of learning to become a GTM engineer, however, is about getting really good at using the GTM engineering tools. And there’s no better tool to start with than Clay—a product that has in the last few years become the foundation for many GTM engineers’ workflows.

Thanks again to Clay for partnering with Next Play to make this piece possible.

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If you are looking for GTM engineering and other types of roles, be sure to check out Next Play.