What is GTM engineering & why is everyone talking about it?

In today’s digital-first world, most b2b revenue leaders are swimming in a sea of sales tools. They’ve implemented all of these solutions in an effort to be more productive, have better data, and give customers a better experience.

But, oftentimes, they find themselves treading water with a bunch of disconnected tools that aren’t driving desired results. 

To fix this, a new role has emerged: the go-to-market (GTM) engineer. Part builder, party storyteller, part operator, these folks turn technical skills into scalable revenue.

As software becomes more complex and sales cycles grow longer, GTM engineering is becoming a secret weapon of high-performing go-to-market teams. 

Keep reading to learn more about why today’s leading organizations are increasingly hiring GTM engineers — and why your company may want to do the same.

What is GTM engineering?

GTM engineering is a hybrid role that combines software engineering, solutions architecture, and growth strategy, helping organizations bring products to market more effectively.

The GTM engineering role emerged in response to increasingly sophisticated sales tech stack and increasingly technical business buyers. These folks help accelerate sales, marketing, and customer support workflows by building out sales tools, integrations, and reporting. 

What do GTM engineers do?

GTM engineers aren’t just another version of SalesOps or RevOps. They represent a new technical function designed solely to support modern GTM teams. By sitting between engineering and customer-facing teams — and being able to speak each group’s language — GTM engineers turn complexity into clarity. The end result? Faster deals, better customer experiences, and growth that scales.

GTM engineers lead efforts including:

• Developing custom integrations. By connecting your products with third-party tools and customer tech stacks, GTM engineers streamline onboarding while making it easier to show prospects how your tools can benefit them.

• Automating repetitive workflows. From lead enrichment to spinning up free trials, they use code to streamline and automate time-consuming tasks. As a result, already-busy teams have more time to focus on the most important work.

• Prototyping go-to-market experiments. GTM engineers quickly test new product features or campaign ideas to help teams figure out what works and what doesn’t before committing more engineering resources to any motion.

• Enabling sales and customer success teams. By using technical knowledge to build reusable assets, GTM engineers help customer-facing teams deliver more value faster, and with more confidence.

• Analyzing GTM data. GTM engineers dive deep into analytics, CRM, and marketing systems to surface actionable insights they can use to enhance their GTM strategies. This makes it easier to measure what’s working and iterate accordingly.

Do you need to hire a GTM engineer?

As go-to-market strategies become more technical, companies across the SaaS landscape are racing to hire GTM engineers — and chances are your competitors already have. Believe it or not, job listings for GTM engineers have increased 300% on LinkedIn over the last year — a sure sign that these roles are highly in demand.

If you’re building a product that entails rapid iteration, custom integrations, and any technical storytelling, it may be time to add one to your team, too.

Top reasons to hire a GTM engineer

1. Your data is a bit of a disaster

A clean, trustworthy CRM is the foundation of any successful revenue operations or GTM strategy. But if your team is constantly battling duplicate records, messy ownership, or leads routed to the wrong rep, you probably need expert help.

By automating lead enrichment processes, enforcing clear data ownership logic, and building merge-and-purge routines, GTM engineers can untangle the chaos and help you find the needle in the proverbial haystack. By bringing engineering rigor to your go-to-market data stack, they ensure the data powering your campaigns and sales motions is highly accurate and actionable. 

2. Sales tools aren’t speaking the same language

Does it seem like your sales tech stack is less like a single source of truth and more like a game of telephone, with different tools reporting different numbers for the same metrics? If your data isn’t syncing across your stack and your team is super used to manual updates, that’s a clear sign of friction in your GTM and sales processes. When systems are disconnected, it leads to broken attribution, inaccurate forecasting, and wasted time across the entire revenue team.

GTM engineers can be a godsend here by serving as the connective tissue between your tools. By writing scripts, building APIs, and designing real-time data pipelines, they help ensure that consistent data flows across your CRM, lead generation, and marketing automation tools.

At the same time, GTM engineers also help automate repetitive tasks, like lead routing and data normalization, reducing human error and giving sales reps more time to focus on what they do best: selling.

Add it all up, and when your GTM tools start speaking the same language, your whole GTM operation runs smoother, faster, and smarter.

3. You want to integrate AI into existing tools

If you’ve spent time on the internet in the last two years, you’ve probably noticed that sales platforms are rolling out AI-powered features at a rapid pace. But figuring out which ones can actually move the needle, and implementing them as effectively as possible, is an entirely different story. 

From lead scoring to auto-generated follow-ups, AI-powered sales tools promise big gains. But those gains can only be unlocked if they’re integrated smoothly and adopted by the team.

This is another area where a GTM engineer can help by evaluating AI tools to see which align with your workflows and needs, then handling the integration and automation behind the scenes. The right GTM engineer will ensure your data is structured properly, connect APIs, and build custom logic to ensure the AI outputs are actually useful to your team.

On top of this, these folks work cross-functionally, ensuring that the tools they deploy are intuitive and useful to both sales and marketing colleagues. Without this pivotal position, even the most effective AI tools may very well end up unused.

Top skills for a GTM engineer

GTM engineers wear many different hats. That being the case, the best ones bring a unique blend of skills to your organization. From writing clean code to understanding customer needs, here are four key skills the ideal GTM engineer will possess.

1. Technical fluency in your existing stack

The right GTM engineer will be knowledgeable about the tools your team uses. Whether you rely on Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, a GTM engineer should be able to build bespoke solutions that play nicely with your core tech stack. With strong technical chops, they enable GTM teams to experiment faster thanks to smoother integrations and less reliance on third-party devs.

2. Adept at pulling data & important analytics

GTM engineers know how to pull the right data from the right systems using any number of methods (e.g., SQL queries and API calls) — whatever’s needed for the task at hand. Leveraging these skills, they help surface insights that ultimately drive decisions while ensuring data flows automatically across teams. .

3. Sales and marketing fundamentals 

GTM engineers understand core go-to concepts like lead scoring and sales pipeline management. This knowledge enables them to design systems that best support the way your teams sell and market your products. The end result? Technical solutions that actually solve business problems — not things that are built just for the sake of it.

4. Problem-solving and always asking why 

GTM engineers are laser-focused on discovering bottlenecks and other friction points across the customer journey. Instead of settling for surface-level fixes, GTM engineers dig deep to find root causes. Curious by nature, they ask why until they discover solutions that are scalable. Thanks to this determined mindset, these individuals transform messy, complicated processes into optimized, automated workflows end-to-end.

GTM engineer job description

As demand for GTM engineers increases, many companies are still trying to figure out what the role looks like in practice. To give you a better idea, here’s a sample job description you can use to figure out the scope, responsibilities, and skills needed for your first GTM hire.

Here’s a sample go-to-market engineer job description.

About the role

We’re looking for a technical, curious, and business-savvy GTM engineer to join our fast-moving team. This hybrid role sits smack dab in the center of engineering, marketing, sales, and customer success, so you’ll dip your toes in a little bit of everything. In this role, you’ll build out our tools, automate and optimize workflows, and help teams extract data insights easier — all with your sights set on helping us drive revenue growth and enhance the customer experience.

What you’ll do

• Develop and maintain integrations across our GTM stack (e.g., Salesforce, Outreach, and Vidyard)
• Automate mundane repeatable GTM workflows like lead routing and data enrichment
• Partner with RevOps to build scalable processes powered by clean data
• Identify bottlenecks in the buyer journey and design technical fixes
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams on fast experiments and iterate accordingly
• Monitor and improve data pipelines to surface more actionable insights

Who you are

• A systems thinker with technical chops and experience across GTM functions
• Proficient in languages like SQL and modern data platforms
• Comfortable working with CRM, marketing, and sales tools (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo)
• Strong communicator who can collaborate effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues
• Curious and not afraid to ask why to get to the root of the problem

Bonus points

• Familiarity with product-led growth or working in a high-octane SaaS environment
• Experience using tools like dbt and Fivetran
• Prior experience in RevOps, DevRel, or as a Solutions Architect or Growth Marketer

You shouldn’t cut and paste that description into your job posting, but it should help you start moving in the right direction.

How to hire a GTM engineer

Hiring a GTM engineer can feel tricky, especially if it’s your first time. It’s a relatively new role, and the perfect candidate might not have even had the exact job title before. 

As you begin searching for your first (or next!) GTM engineer, focus on skills and mindset, looking for problem-solvers with strong technical skills who’ve worked across multiple departments, including sales, marketing, and RevOps.

Where to find GTM engineer candidates

Since GTM engineering is still a nascent role, you might have a hard time finding candidates who have that exact position. Should you run into that problem, look for candidates who are currently sales engineers, solutions architects, RevOps analysts, or developer advocates instead. Many of these folks are already used to being at the intersection of multiple teams, so they already know what cross-functional collaboration is like.

And don’t forget to look internally to see if someone is the right fit, too. You never know when a current employee can end up being a rockstar GTM engineer.

How to screen a GTM engineer candidate

You’ve identified a couple of candidates and are ready to see who should move forward in the process. The best candidates will have experience across multiple departments, and they’ll also have strong technical skills. They’re able to explain highly technical concepts to non-technical people and have experience building demos and integrations.

To weed folks out of the process, present a real-world scenario, like lead routing is broken, and ask how they’d solve it to see how their mind works. Look for curious individuals who are systems thinkers and have worked with RevOps, growth, or product-led functions before.

How to onboard a GTM engineer successfully

Once an offer has been accepted and the new GTM engineer is starting their job, have them shadow sales, marketing, and RevOps to get a better idea of any friction inherent in their day to day. Give them access to the full GTM stack and assign them an initial project that’s a relatively light lift but can make a huge impact (e.g., automating a manual workflow that annoys everyone).

To ensure the individual is transitioning into your company smoothly, schedule weekly syncs with cross-functional leaders to stay aligned and start building relationships. Once they’re comfortable, have them map out your entire GTM workflow and identify areas for improvement. At that point, they’re off to the races.

The future of GTM engineering

As companies continue trying to engage increasingly sophisticated business buyers more effectively in pursuit of growth, GTM engineers are emerging as the glue that ties product, data, and revenue teams together. 

As a result, it’s all but certain that GTM engineer jobs will become more common in the future, since these roles help organizations build smarter systems and deliver stronger customer experiences..

‍