GTM Engineer Hiring Benchmarks: The $112k Gap

Introduction

Two companies post the same job "GTM Engineer" on the same day. One pays $250k, the other pays $138k. Both think they're market rate. They might be right.

This report analyzes 288 unique jobs across 256 companies and draws on interviews with 22 hiring teams to explain how a $112k gap is hiding inside a single job title, and what to do about it.

Key Findings

1. Four archetypes cover 90% of roles: SWE, Data, Outbound, Ops
2. $112k median salary gap hiding inside the same job title
3. Less than half of roles mention Clay
4. For technical GTMEs, there are 2.1 open jobs per candidate
5. 41% of companies now benchmark comp against engineering

What is a GTM Engineer?

Ask an SDR Manager what a GTM Engineer does, and they'll likely say "Clay tables." Ask a RevOps person, and they'll tell you about their broken integrations. Ask a technical CEO, and they might say they want "an engineer who is business systems curious."

I heard all of these from actual hiring managers.

To cut through the noise, I analyzed the full job descriptions for every GTME job posted online, and found the following four archetypes, covering 90% of the roles:

Many JDs overlap, in part because hiring managers don't actually know what they need. A useful heuristic: each of these is a bottleneck to growth.

If you have 500+ employees and Salesforce Unlimited, you need Ops or Data (maybe both.)

If you believe cold email is your best channel, you need Outbound.

If you see an opportunity to grow by building new systems that don't exist yet (AI Agents, web scrapers, just-in-time software) you need an SWE.

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“I told my CEO I need an IT guy in Marketing.”

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How Fast is GTM Engineering Growing?

GTM Engineering as a profession grew 11.4x in 2025. I worried that was an error in the data, so I pulled all jobs posted by the same companies to compare. Within the same companies, GTM Engineer total share of GTM roles grew from under 10% throughout 2024 to 46% by Q4'25.

Increasingly, companies are making "GTM Engineer" their first GTM hire.

The $112k Gap

The GTM Engineer role is a hybrid of "GTM" and "Engineer", and this shows up in the salaries: the Engineer roles that focus on GTM earn $250k median, while the GTM roles that borrow the Engineer label earn only $137.5k per year.

Factors driving the gap:

1. Roles that require code pay $160.5k vs $147.5k for those that do not — a small gap, because "code" can mean anything from Python pipelines and new applications to fixing a workflow in n8n or Clay.
2. SWE roles pay ~$101k less when housed in Ops rather than Engineering; Data roles lose $29k
3. Roles that mention Clay earn $26k less than those that do not
4. Tech stack: Hubspot+Clay roles pay $108.5k, compared to Python-based roles at $210k.

These are not independent variables; Pure SWE roles never mention Clay, for example. Instead, they roll up to an org worldview: is the company investing in the upside of an Engineer who can increase revenue through code? Or are they just copying a trend we saw online?

Is this role GTM or Engineering?

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“So, why do you want this Sales Operations job?”

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The typical GTM Engineer role asks for what is essentially a unicorn:

• 2-5 years of experience, including some software development
• Understanding of critical business systems and architecture
• Willing to work in an open system (GTM) rather than a closed system (codebase)
• Capable of producing code and campaigns that generate revenue
• Sit next to non-technical colleagues rather than other devs
• Live and die by revenue numbers rather than features

Yet the typical offer is the same salary as an entry-level SWE, which helps to explain the thin applicant pools.

This seems to be an artifact of comp data coming from the Ops function, rather than the engineering function. But it's changing:

Over the past 90 days, 41% of GTME roles offered a higher minimum salary than equivalent SWE roles at the same company.

The market has split into companies that see an engineer embedded in GTM, and companies that see a rebranded Ops role.

The Clay Effect

Clay did not invent this role, but their viral "Rise of the GTM Engineer" post anchored expectations to a specific archetype. Not everyone is buying it.

Increasingly, I've found technical CEOs who came across the title "GTM Engineer" and immediately realize this is what they want in GTM: an engineer. They may not even know what Clay is! The job title itself says a lot.

Others have shared that while they initially started looking for a Clay specialist, they concluded they actually need either a manager of their systems beyond Clay, or a technical GTM lead who includes Clay in their toolkit.

The data backs this up. After Clay's post in July 2025, total GTME roles surged, but Clay seems to maintain around 50% of the market.

Roles that mention Clay earn $26k less than those that don't. This would be the headline, if the org chart didn't create an even larger gap.

Why Are GTM Engineers Hard to Hire?

For technical GTM Engineers, there are 2.1 open jobs for every candidate on LinkedIn. Not per year - right now.

For context, most marketing roles have hundreds of candidates on LinkedIn for every job opening. In marketing and strategy & operations roles, there are hundreds of candidates for every opening.

For GTM Engineers, it's 9 to 1.

Filter for the ones who can write code, and the ratio inverts: there are more jobs open for GTM Engineers with JS/TS experience than there are total candidates.

This shows up in practice: I've seen $200k GTME jobs at well-funded startups get fewer than 100 clicks on LinkedIn, while similar RevOps and AI SWE roles hit 100 clicks in an hour.

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“We're building an internal product team for 300 sales and marketing stakeholders.”

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27% of 2025 roles are at Series A-C startups, 14% of companies came out of YCombinator, and 38% have 500+ employees.

The best candidates don't know this job exists. They're running their own SaaS, doing GTM Engineering every day without calling it that. Before this role emerged, "taking a job" meant something different to them: a ticket queue and endless meetings, rather than a target number and endless experiments.

The people you want are scrolling past your listing, assuming it's not for them.

GTM Engineer Backgrounds and Career Paths

Most GTM Engineers are first time GTM Engineers. Here are the most common titles they had before:

There is a long tail here: a handful of GTM Engineers come from other engineer sources: Security Engineer, Systems Engineer, or even CS Student. With social media teaching a generation how to build influence, expect to see more "GTM curious" engineers coming out of university.

GTM Engineers, as a rule, are individual contributors, so it may come as a surprise that half previously held a role that looks like managing others (or at least outcomes):

From my personal experience, GTM Engineers seem to be entrepreneurial types who care about growing the number, whether they come from GTM or Engineering.

• GTMEs are self starters. The majority previously held roles that manage outcomes more than people: Heads, Directors, Leads, Founders.
• GTMEs have both people skills and software skills. They are often too technical to be an SDR and too people oriented to be a regular SWE.
• GTMEs love that AI accelerates tempo. Founders represent the third most common job function.

What Skills are required for a GTM Engineer?

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“We want an engineer who is business systems curious.”

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People Skills

90% of roles mention at least one people skill. Here's the breakdown:

The inclusion of people skills is notable: this is like requiring a drone engineer/pilot to also rally the troops.

Most GTM Engineers hired in 2026 will be the only "Engineer" on their team. They won't be on the "real" engineering team. They might not even have access to the core repos. This engineer has to live in the revenue org: pipeline reviews, Slack DMs from AEs, explaining to a CMO what Python is and how a snake can grow pipeline.

The people skills requirement is a Gilfoyle filter. Plenty of engineers can do this job. Hiring managers want to know: will they want to?

Founder Skills

39% of roles mention at least one founder-type trait. Here's the breakdown:

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“I was doing this job and didn't realize it had a name.”

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Technical Skills

86% of roles mention REST APIs, but only 42% name a specific programming language. The gap suggests many hiring managers know they need someone who can "work with APIs" without specifying how.

On the other side, 35% of roles mention a no-code platform:

Tool Clusters

The tools required closely follow the archetypes:

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“Our last GTM Engineer left because his company was accepted into YC.”

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AI Tool Mentions

Mentions of AI steadily increase, but this does not signal an AI builder role: mentions of AI, alone, don't correlate with higher salary. Instead, it appears many Clay-Stack roles and RevOps roles are now acknowledging the upside of hiring someone who can leverage AI.

Only 17% of roles use keywords that indicate actually building with AI:

Recommendations for Hiring Managers

1. Choose Your Fighter

The $112k spread between a pure SWE and a pure GTM reflects differences in talent pools, expectations, and what they'll tolerate. Pick the wrong archetype and you'll either overpay for someone bored by the work, or lowball the offers and wonder why your req is still open two quarters later.

Start here:

If you're unsure, ask: "Will this person ship code to production, or configure tools that already exist?" The answer determines your archetype—and your comp band.

2. Pay for the skillset, not the department

41% of the market already benchmarks against engineering. If you wait for Carta to update their recommendations, you'll miss out on key talent.

3. Write a JD that filters correctly

Be specific about technical requirements, explicit about reporting structure, and sell the upside. Keyword stuffing causes self-selection problems on both ends: talented Clay-stack builders will self-reject when they see a requirement to write code, and vice versa.

4. Filter for builders

Can they design new plays, or only replicate templates? The best GTM Engineers see a half-built system and immediately start asking questions about both the design and the results so far. The rest show you the playbook they used last time.

Sample interview prompts:

• "Here's a Clay table we built. What would you change?"
• "Walk me through how you'd build an outbound sequence from scratch. What data would you need and where would you get it?"
• "Our CRM has three sources of truth for company size. How would you fix that?"
• "Show me something you built that broke, and how you debugged it."

In general, look for candidates who get energized by ambiguity.

5. Get creative about sourcing

The talent pool is thin. You won't win by posting and waiting.

Where to look:

• Engineers who studied economics, and marketers who studied engineering
• Bootcamp graduates. They might think Kafka is an author and Go is a game, but they have the dedication to bridge both worlds
• Systems Engineers, Sales Engineers, and Solutions Architects (but expect to pay comparable rates)
• Indie hackers building their own CRM or GTM SaaS. They are on the frontier and don't know this job exists yet.

There are incredible talents out there, struggling in Template Hell jobs, who will become digital rainmakers for the right company. Find them before your competitors do.

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“We couldn't find a GTM lead, so an investor said to add 'Engineer' to the title.”

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About Me

I'm Steven Moody, GTM Engineer. Former founder, former people manager. Python, TypeScript, Outbound, and Hubspot. I'll leave the supply-demand math as an exercise for the reader.

I pitched companies on "a programmer embedded in Sales" years before the title existed. When the market caught up I found myself interviewing with many companies, but nobody could agree on the job spec. So I pulled the data and wrote the report.

I write about AI-first GTM, distribution, and the systems that connect code to revenue.

Contact: steven (at) stevenmoody (dot) com

AI spam will be routed to my AI assistant, who will sell your AI assistant a ten year license of Oracle Sales.

Appendix

Compensation Benchmarks

Salary data comes mostly (~72%) from disclosure states (CA, NY, CO, WA) and represents the posted salaries, not the final offers.

Here is the salary data for pure skillsets, not taking into consideration their role in the org. Some hiring managers will lean toward this one when hiring SWEs: I think the low applicant volume and thin talent pool argues against this.

Archetype	P25	Median	P75	N
SWE	$147,300	$165,000	$222,245	81
Data	$126,250	$163,750	$189,225	44
Outbound	$125,000	$145,000	$165,000	83
Operations	$127,500	$140,000	$152,500	52

Owing to the emergent nature of this role, there are few Senior/Staff roles posted, and no Junior roles found. Salaries tend to be higher in SF and NYC compared to the rest of the US, and remote roles generally earn less. Currently, larger companies pay more, but the skills seem to drive this more than company size.

About the data

Data was collected from interviews with 22 companies and data available online, both from job posting APIs and from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Jobs. Of the 288 roles analyzed, 284 had sufficient salary data for the compensation breakdowns; 4 were excluded due to incomplete or non-comparable comp information.

To minimize noise, I excluded any jobs from agencies, consulting, or staffing firms, and excluded any jobs outside of the United States.

Many jobs in my data were duplicates not flagged by the data sources. As most companies are only hiring one GTM Engineer right now, I was able to manually flag duplicates based on title/company match and JD similarity.