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 stay close to the building.
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. They sit inside a marketing team and build 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 the old work stops swallowing your week, you start building marketing that wasn’t possible two years ago. You create 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 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. We just raised a $96M Series C at a $1B valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, alongside Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Evantic, Saga, and South Park Commons. 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 has grown from an analytics tool into 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 like Claude, Cursor, and ChatGPT 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.
The latest MCP evolution connects agents to a knowledge graph and adds 15 new capabilities built for how Marketing Engineers actually work.
If you’re a Profound customer, point your MCP-compatible client at mcp.tryprofound.com and you’re off. For three concrete workflows to start with, comparing competitor pages with live citation data, pulling category reports, and building AI agents, see Three workflows to try with the Profound MCP.
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, 14 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.
What skills does a Marketing Engineer need?
The most important skill is marketing judgment. You need to know what moves the business, what metrics are noise, and what customers actually care about. Technical ability can multiply your judgment. It can also multiply a bad idea.
After that, I would organize the skill stack into five areas.
Systems thinking. You are building things other people rely on. That means thinking through failure modes, understanding how your work connects to adjacent workflows, and planning for change. A one-off script is easy. A system three other people depend on is a different job entirely.
Context and data design. Agents are only as good as the context you give them. You need to structure information so the system can find the right facts at the right time. Shared sources of truth, clean inputs, permissions, and current product context matter more than a clever prompt.
Workflow product thinking. Understand the workflow before you automate it. What is the input? What is the output? Where does it break? Who else touches it? Marketing Engineers who skip this step build automations that look great in demos and fall apart in real life.
Technical fluency. You can start without a computer science degree. I have built most of what I have built at Profound with AI coding tools and enough understanding to know when something is wrong. You need the willingness to read error messages, understand APIs, test your work, and stay calm when something breaks.
Maintenance and governance. Agents break when data formats change. Automations fail when third-party APIs update. A Marketing Engineer owns the system after it ships. That means monitoring, documentation, permissions, and regular maintenance.
Marketers can learn every part of this. AI tools have made the technical parts dramatically more accessible. Developing taste takes longer. You have to know what is worth building, what is overengineered, and what should stay manual.
Marketing Engineer vs. marketing ops vs. growth engineer
These roles overlap, especially at smaller companies. I think about the center of gravity for each role.
The Marketing Engineer owns the systems other marketers run their work through. A content team might use an agent to brief writers. Demand generation might pull from a shared enrichment layer. Product marketing might maintain a context layer that every channel can query. The Marketing Engineer builds those capabilities and keeps them working.
Marketing ops can become the enabling layer. Good ops people create the governance and deployment rules that make shared systems trustworthy. At Samsara, marketing ops owns the marketplace, systems, and deployment motion for agents while helping other marketers build. At a smaller company, one person may cover both jobs.
Growth engineers usually work closer to the product. They run experiments in the codebase and build growth loops for users. Marketing Engineers stay inside marketing and build leverage across content, lifecycle, demand generation, communications, and AI search.
What the Marketing Engineer Podcast taught me
I started The Marketing Engineer Podcast to talk to people already doing this work. Three conversations changed how I think about the role.
Everyone should build. Shared systems still need owners
Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing at Samsara, told me at 22:33:
“Every single marketer needs to be a marketing engineer.”
Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing at Samsara
She was describing a 230-person marketing organization running roughly 90 agents. Her point is that AI fluency has become a baseline expectation for every marketer.
Every marketer should be able to build for their own work. They have the deepest context on the workflow, edge cases, and judgment calls. A lifecycle marketer knows where the handoffs break. A product marketer knows which positioning nuance an agent will miss.
The title still needs a specific meaning. In a 230-person organization, someone owns the infrastructure those 90 agents run on. Someone handles deployment, maintenance, permissions, data access, and discovery. That is the Marketing Engineer.
Cheap production makes judgment more valuable
Reema Batta, VP of Growth Marketing at Figma, put it directly at 0:18:
“Production bottlenecks are going away, and the bottleneck is moving way more upstream. And that upstream is judgment.”
Reema Batta, VP of Growth Marketing at Figma
When content gets cheap to produce, the scarce resource becomes deciding what deserves to exist. Weak judgment can now produce weak output at enormous scale.
The Marketing Engineer sits at that upstream point. You decide what gets built, which context it can trust, how people use it, and when the system should stop. The job requires real marketing judgment alongside technical skill.
Personal tools have to become multiplayer systems
Matt Swulinski, Head of Growth at Wispr Flow, gave me this rule at 35:43:
“Design the tools and the systems you build today to be multiplayer.”
Matt Swulinski, Head of Growth at Wispr Flow
Building a tool for yourself is fast and forgiving. Building a tool your team depends on requires a higher standard. It needs shared context, clear interfaces, feedback loops, permissions, documentation, and error handling people can understand.
This is where marketing engineering gets real. A personal workflow can depend on everything stored in your head. A multiplayer system has to survive handoff and keep working when you leave the room.
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. You can also watch every episode of The Marketing Engineer Podcast on YouTube, where you’ll hear directly from practitioners and leaders who’ve reorganized how their teams operate, built marketing workflows for scale and quality, and invented capabilities that didn’t exist before. And if any of this lands for you, come find me on LinkedIn. I want to know what you’re building.