How to hire a GTM Engineer
What to look for, where to find them, and the skills that matter
Many GTM leaders we talk to are drowning in manual processes at the same time they’re trying to build their first revenue engine. They know they need help with automation — but they’re still struggling to find the right candidates for the job.
Most teams approach GTM engineering hiring backwards: by posting generic job descriptions without understanding what they're actually solving for. But hiring a successful GTME requires knowing exactly when you need this role and how to identify the right person.
Here's how we think about hiring GTMEs effectively, based on real examples from Clay and the dozens of GTM teams we've helped scale.
TL;DR
Timing matters: Hire a GTME when you're ready to build repeatable revenue systems, not when you're still figuring out product-market fit or positioning.
Look for hybrids: The best candidates combine commercial thinking with technical building.
Focus on adaptability over expertise: Prioritize candidates who love learning new tools and think like detectives about GTM problems.
Design practical interviews: Use behavioral questions, systems thinking challenges, and real take-home assignments. We have examples of those at the bottom.
Recruit from communities: The best GTMEs hang out in Clay communities, RevOps groups, and LinkedIn sharing automation workflows
When to hire a GTME
Bring on your first GTME once you're ready to build out your revenue org: when you’re launching a real outbound or inbound motion and need someone to help design, implement, and operationalize it.
If you're still in the early stages of validating your positioning or finding product-market fit, it's probably too early to hire a GTME. For early stage companies, founders often wear the GTME hat when they’re getting their hands dirty with Clay. But once you're ready to stand up a sales engine, run email campaigns, or score inbound and outbound leads, a GTME can quickly become one of your most strategic hires.
Regardless of company size or funding status, you need a GTME when you have repeatable processes to systematize, not when you're still figuring out what to build.
What makes a strong GTME candidate
GTM Engineer is still a new title, so it can be difficult to find someone with direct experience. Look for candidates with transferable skills and the ability to ramp quickly. The best GTMEs are hybrids: part commercial thinker, part builder. Strong archetypes often come from GTM ops backgrounds: sales ops, rev ops, marketing ops, and similar roles. This is what Robert Jones at Canva has to say about GTME candidates:
The best GTM Engineers think like product designers—they approach revenue generation as a design challenge, mapping out customer journeys and building systems that scale rather than simply connecting tools. What I look for is someone who genuinely understands sales teams as their users, grasping not just what's broken but why it matters to the people using these systems daily.
You want someone who gets excited about diagramming complex processes, can communicate effectively with both executives and SDRs, and instinctively asks 'how can we leverage AI to make this significantly better?' They need some sales exposure—not necessarily hitting quotas, but enough to understand why timing matters in outreach and where automation might damage relationship building. The key indicator is finding someone who's already a technology enthusiast, actively using tools like ChatGPT or Claude and quickly mastering new platforms without extensive training. This industry evolves rapidly, so you need someone who finds that constant change energizing rather than overwhelming. Get these qualities right and you'll have a strategic thought partner, not just someone waiting for direction.
Here are the specific areas that actually predict success:
Technical fluency: They may not be classically trained, but they like learning new tools and vibecoding. Familiarity with Clay, n8n, Zapier, Lovable, Bolt, TypeScript, Python, or SQL is nice to have. The real signal is a willingness to learn by tinkering. Our GTME Spencer started as a product designer and learned SQL on the job with Claude.
Commercial bias: They think about the ROI of their work, constantly asking questions like "Does this workflow actually help someone close a deal?" They understand that automation should drive revenue outcomes, not just efficiency.
Curiosity: They approach every go-to-market puzzle like detectives, breaking down complex problems systematically and investigating when things don't work as expected.
Experimental mindset: They know how to test ideas, validate signals, and turn feedback loops into better systems. They're comfortable with iterative improvement rather than perfect solutions.
Hacker mentality: They're resourceful and creative in how they solve problems. The question shouldn't be "Can I do this?" but "How do I do this?" They find ways to make things work with available tools and constraints.
Comfort with ambiguity: They need to be able to take a big problem and figure out how to tackle it. They should not only handle ambiguity but actually enjoy it—turning unclear requirements into structured approaches.
There are some motion-specific needs that will depend on your revenue operation:
Product-led growth: Look for someone strong in product data and SQL—they'll need to understand conversion paths, usage patterns, and how product signals translate to sales readiness.
Sales-led: The focus shifts to funnel conversion, handoff processes, and outbound effectiveness. They should understand pipeline velocity and what drives deal progression.
Before hiring externally, see if anyone on your current team could uplevel. If not, look externally. (More on that later.)
This is what Alexander DeMoulin, director of RevOps at Intercom, has to say about assessing GTME candidates:
The right person absolutely needs to think way outside the box. I want to understand real examples of times when they've thrown wacky stuff at the wall and discovered what actually worked. They also need a sales background. I want someone who has sat in the sales seat before as this is a role, at least at larger companies like Intercom, is primarily making sales more efficient and helping them spend as much of their time actually selling.
As far as red flags go, someone who has no experience with traditional ops whether its marketing or sales ops at a company isn’t a great fit for us. We're still early in figuring out GTME and any success will heavily depend on the ability to bridge between what's "always been done" vs. what's possible now.
Crafting the interview process
We recommend a behavioral interview, multiple interviews to evaluate their hacker mentality and ability to handle ambiguity, and a take-home assignment.
Example interview questions
Here are specific questions we've used successfully, organized by skill area:
Systems Thinking:
Tell me about the last process you built from scratch.
Walk me through how you'd diagnose why our email reply rates dropped 30% last month.
Handling Ambiguity
If I asked you to run an experiment with no clear playbook, how would you get started?
If I gave you a database with product usage, CRM, and marketing data, what questions would you ask first?
Prioritization
Tell me about a time you had to ship fast and iterate later. How did you manage tradeoffs?
We need to double our pipeline in six months without adding headcount. How would you approach this?
Creativity
What's the coolest automation you've built or seen? What problem did it solve?
If we had to double our pipeline in 6 months without doubling headcount, what would you do?
Curiosity
What's something technical you taught yourself recently? Why, and how did you approach learning it?
Take-home assignments that work
The best assignments are practical and realistic. Tailor the assignments based on which skills or tools (e.g. Salesforce or SQL) you care most about so that you can see how a candidate works with platforms you use in practice.
Here are example prompts:
Outbound Reply Rate Analysis: You've been provided with a dataset containing information about outbound emails sent to prospects as part of Clay's go-to-market motion. Your task is to analyze this data and provide insights that can help improve reply rates and downstream funnel performance. The goal is to identify which variables—such as job function, company stage, industry, team composition, or timing—most strongly influence reply likelihood, and to surface opportunities to better target, prioritize, or personalize outreach.
Outbound Campaign Creation: Your task is to build an outbound campaign using the complete GTM data provided. You have 60 minutes to read this document, analyze the data, design and build your solution.
Hypothesis Creation and Testing: Form a hypothesis about what companies they should target and then execute on that to find those companies through enrichment, AI, data scraping, etc.
Inbound Lead Analysis: You've been provided with a dataset containing information about inbound leads who have submitted a form, signed up, or otherwise engaged directly with Clay. Your task is to analyze this data and identify opportunities to improve inbound qualification, response, and conversion rates. The goal is to spot patterns in who converts and who doesn't, and to recommend improvements to how inbound leads are prioritized, worked, and messaged.
Strong candidates will break the problem down, explain their assumptions and fallback logic, and identify both external levers (like new data sources) and internal ones (like SDR-to-AE routing delays).
Red flags
Even candidates who sail through interviews can fall short on the job. As you hire your first GTME, keep an eye out for these common warning signs:
Tunnel vision: Suggesting only one channel or approach without considering alternatives or trade-offs.
Shiny Object Syndrome: Good candidates will be on the cutting edge of technology but they should know the difference between a useful tool and a trendy one.
Ignoring obvious risks: Not thinking through challenges like deliverability issues, targeting fatigue, or data quality problems.
Over-engineering: Jumping straight to complex solutions without considering simpler approaches first.
Lack of commercial awareness: Focusing purely on technical implementation without connecting to business outcomes.
Where to find the right GTME candidates
Your next GTME might be hanging out in Clay communities, RevOps groups, or posting on LinkedIn about automations they've built. At Clay, some of our best hires came directly from our ICP — people who were already using our platform to solve similar problems.
Here are some specific recommendations for sourcing:
Submit your job listing to Clay's GTME job board
Post in Slack communities like Clay and The GTM Engineer Lab.
Email noah@thegtmengineer.ai to get your job featured in the GTM Engineer newsletter
Look for people sharing automation workflows on LinkedIn
Engage with practitioners in RevOps communities who are solving real problems
The best GTMEs are often already employed and engaged in the community—they're not actively job searching but are curious about new challenges and opportunities to build interesting systems. Here’s Rippling’s Noah Adelstein on what he looks for in a GTME:
What I look for in a strong GTM Engineer candidate is someone who's deeply curious about technology and can give you specific examples of going down interesting rabbit holes with their curiosity. They should be able to walk you through building a complicated workflow in detail—bonus points if they mention tools like n8n or Clay. I want candidates who have clear spikes in analytical skills, customer empathy, or creativity, depending on what the role specifically needs, and ideally they teach you something new during the conversation in their area of strength. The red flags are pretty clear: if they don't know any modern software tools like Clay, only talk about experience with traditional marketing channels, or have no GTM experience whatsoever, that's concerning. Someone without a GTM background can likely become a GTM engineer, but they'll need significant ramp time to get there.
Building for the long-term
We're excited about the rise of GTMEs and how fast the ecosystem is growing. GTM Engineers are becoming the foundation behind organizations finding their GTM alpha—the systematic advantages that compound over time.
The goal isn't just to hire someone who can implement tools today, but to find someone who can build the systems that will scale your revenue engine as both your business and the technology landscape evolve. When you find that person, they'll quickly become one of your most strategic hires. Take the time to build the foundation properly rather than rushing to fill the role with the first person who knows how to use automation tools. Your team will thank you.
Other Resources
Matthias Powell, co-founder of The Kiln, a Clay that specializes in creating custom workflows for inbound, outbound, and RevOps use cases, has a great LinkedIn post that lays out what he’s learned about GTME interviews. The PDF is below.
Sample take home assignments
Sample job descriptions
Thanks to Alexander DeMoulin, Robert Jones, Noah Adelstein, and the GTME team at Clay for helping shape the ideas in this article.
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