What Is A Marketing Engineer?

This is hard to admit, but I didn’t want the Head of Marketing job at Profound.

I’m not the right fit for it. And I told that to Trevor Pyle when he started as the second marketer here.

But that left me with a question I had to actually answer: what do I want?

What did I actually want?

Throughout my career, I’ve learned the hard lesson that you have to be honest with yourself in order to get to where you want to go. Sometimes that means saying no. I was honest with myself, and I was honest with Trevor too.

I told him what I didn’t want: a bigger title following the same path. What I wanted was something different. Something that didn’t exist yet.

I thrive when I can make a direct impact. Rapidly experimenting with new tools. Unblocking my team. Building authentic relationships online and in-person. Showing up at conferences, on podcasts, in webinars, in DMs. I want to build, not manage builders.

The problem was, that job didn’t exist. There was no title for “the marketer who wants to build systems and stay hands-on forever.” So we made one up.

Turns out you can just do that. You can string two words together, put it in your email signature, and keep it moving.

Founding Marketing Engineer.

I’m grateful to Trevor and to our CEO James Cadwallader for believing in me to help bring this role into the world.

What is a Marketing Engineer?

A Marketing Engineer is part-builder, part-marketer. Not an ops person. Not an engineer who got bored. Someone who sits inside a marketing team and builds the AI agents, automations, and data infrastructure that let everyone else do their highest-leverage work.

The shortest version I can give you:

A Marketing Engineer doesn’t do the marketing. They build the machine that does.

The job has two halves. The first half automates what marketers already do. The second half builds marketing that wasn’t possible two years ago. The first half makes you faster. The second half makes you new.

We’ll get to both. But first, why now.

Why does marketing finally get its own role?

Every other function got its technical counterpart years ago.

Finance got financial engineering. Product got product ops and platform engineering. Sales got RevOps in the 2010s. Then around 2023, Clay formalized the GTM Engineer — one technical operator who could collapse the entire outbound sales stack into a single role.

Marketing didn’t get its version. Until now.

Sales got RevOps. Go-to-market got the GTM Engineer. It’s long overdue for marketing to have its own.

And the timing isn’t an accident. Every marketing team I talk to tells me some version of the same story: brilliant people buried under operational weight. 80% of the week is eaten by work that could be systematized. The remaining 20% is supposed to be where the magic happens. Twenty percent is not enough. It never was.

The Marketing Engineer changes that. When the systems are in place, the rest of the team gets something rare: permission to focus. On taste. On creativity. On the slow, deliberate, deeply human work of building a brand people remember.

Marketing Engineer: Part 1

The first half is the doorbell.

Think about the video doorbell on your front porch. You don’t sit at the kitchen table watching the feed all day. It watches for you. Someone drops off a package, your phone buzzes. The delivery guy rings while you’re at dinner, you get an alert. The rest of the time, it’s quiet. Working, but not asking for your attention.

That’s the shift.

You used to be the feed. Staring at dashboards. Refreshing the SERP. Checking if that press release got picked up. Wondering if your pricing page is still ranking. That was your whole day.

Dashboards are dead. You don’t need to check a dashboard anymore. You need to build an agent that checks the data and pings you when something is wrong. You define what “wrong” means. The system does the watching.

Every “I should really check if our competitors updated their pricing page” becomes a system that watches for you and pings you the second something changes. Every “I wonder if our new landing page got cited in AI answers yet” becomes an email alert.

You build it once. You set what matters. You walk away.

This is the unsexy half. Nobody is going to write a manifesto about a Zapier replacement. But this is what gives the rest of your team back their week.

Marketing Engineer: Part 2

This is where the role earns the word “engineer.”

Once you’re not drowning in the old work, you start building marketing that wasn’t possible two years ago. Not faster versions of what you used to do. Genuinely new things.

A few examples from my own backlog:

A Reddit agent that finds the conversations shaping how ChatGPT describes our category, drafts replies, and pings me to review them. The same agent monitors citation decay — how long do these threads get cited before they fall off? Because ChatGPT cites older Reddit threads, the game is to participate in threads you think will become citations in the future.
A webinar-to-AEO engine that takes every webinar Profound has ever recorded, turns each one into an article built for how AI platforms read content, and refreshes them every month with fresh data.
A G2 review agent that reads 800 sales calls, finds the customers who are already in love with us, and drafts a personalized review request to each one in their own words.

None of that existed two years ago. All of it is possible today. And the person at your company who builds it is going to be the most valuable marketer on the team.

Here’s the reframe I want you to take with you. The output of a Marketing Engineer is not more tasks completed. The output is leverage. You want your team to look at you and say, “How does Nick do the work of ten people?” And the answer is that nine of those people are systems you built.

You used to be one marketer doing one marketer’s work. Now you’re one marketer showing up everywhere at once.

What is Profound?

A quick word on where I work, because the company is changing too.

At Profound, we wake up every day trying to build the best software on the planet for marketers to do their job better. Practically, that shows up in three places.

Analytics. We help brands understand and control how they show up when someone asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best running shoe for marathon training?” or “What’s the best CRM for a small team?”

Agents. Profound Agents let you build complex workflows that connect your AEO data, your website, Google Search Console, Slack, Gong calls, and your CMS — Webflow, WordPress, whatever you run.

Sheets. Profound Sheets is a way to run hundreds of those agents at once. Need to add FAQ sections to all your blog posts? You can do it in Profound now.

Profound isn’t an analytics tool anymore. It’s a workbench. Developers have GitHub. Data analysts have Snowflake. Marketing Engineers have Profound. It’s where you come to build the systems that give you leverage.

The latest piece of that workbench is the Profound MCP server, which we just refreshed.

Quick primer in case MCP is new to you. Model Context Protocol is the spec that lets AI tools — Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, whatever you use — talk directly to outside systems. Connect an MCP server once, and the model can pull live data and take real actions on your behalf with no copy-pasting and no exporting.

The Profound MCP server plugs Profound directly into your AI tooling. Ask Claude how your brand is showing up in ChatGPT this week and you get a real answer pulled from real data. Ask it to draft a brief from your top-cited prompts. Ask it to compare your share of voice against three competitors, in your terminal, while you’re already working. Yes, yes, and yes.

If you’re a Profound customer, point your MCP-compatible client at mcp.tryprofound.com and you’re off.

What does a marketing engineer’s day to day look like?

Let me make this concrete with one of our customers.

Arizona College of Nursing. 26 campuses, 15 states, real people getting real degrees so they can go help solve a real nursing shortage. Not the kind of company you expect to show up in an AI strategy talk, which is part of why I love it.

Francis Dayton runs organic growth and web there. His challenge is the same as a lot of yours. When someone in Phoenix or Columbus or Dallas asks ChatGPT “what’s the best online nursing program near me,” he wants his school to be the answer. But enrollment is hyper-local. Every one of those 26 campuses has different competitors, different content gaps, different performance. That’s 26 different markets to research, monitor, and optimize, for one team.

So Francis built agents on Profound. They crawl competitor sitemaps. They surface admissions content gaps. They compare landing page performance across local markets. The research that used to take him five hours a week now happens automatically.

Here’s what’s happened since.

26% increase in AI-referral traffic
51% increase in conversion rates
More applicants. More nurses getting trained.

One marketer. Operating at the scale of a ten-person team.

That’s the job.

You’re already a Marketing Engineer

Here’s the part that should make you feel good.

You’re already doing this.

Maybe not at the full “build ten AI agents that monitor your whole category” scale yet. But all of you have at some point opened ChatGPT and said, “summarize this for me.” Or written a custom GPT. Or strung together a Zap. Or built a Google Sheet with a formula that would make your CFO cry.

That’s the same muscle. Same instinct.

For a long time, being an SEO was the least sexy job in marketing. Underfunded, under-resourced, misunderstood. Your paid media counterpart had a $300,000-a-month budget. You had a Semrush license and ScreamingFrog.

Then 2025 happened. AI search became the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. Your CEO cares. Your CEO’s boss cares. The comms team is in your DMs. Product marketing wants to know what you’re doing. Every executive is asking “how do we show up in AI search?” — and they’re asking you.

It’s like you walked into school on Monday with the brand-new Nintendo Switch. Everyone wants to sit at your table now.

You’re Michael Jordan at the free throw line in game seven. You did the reps. You built the skills. You understand how search works at a depth nobody else in your company does. The ball is in your hands.

The only question is whether you take the shot.

The job market already knows. Ramp is hiring an “Agentic Operator, Growth Marketing” right now. Same job. Same skill stack. Same person.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to call yourself one. You don’t need a new degree. You don’t need to learn to code. You need to start building systems instead of completing tasks.

So what now?

This role is being defined right now. There is going to be at least one Marketing Engineer at every one of our companies inside the next year.

That person should be you. You’ve already done the hard part. You understand how search works. You understand how content gets discovered. You understand the mechanics of being found.

All that’s left is to decide that you’re not going to keep up. You’re not going to catch up. You’re going to lead.

Give yourself the title. Build the systems. Take the shot.

You can be superhuman. I really believe that. And I think most of you already are. You just need to start telling people.

I didn’t want a Head of Marketing job. I wanted this one.

The era of the Marketing Engineer starts now.

If you want to go deeper, we built a free course on Marketing Engineering — take it here. And if any of this lands for you, come find me on LinkedIn. I want to know what you’re building.