🚀 Founding Marketer @profound ⬅️ Former Growth Consultant for @watershed @airhq @glean @angellist @typefaceai @float_financial ⏪ Prev @loom @mail_gun
Brooklyn, NY
Joined July 2011
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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: what do 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 and ways of unblocking my team, creating authentic relationships online and in-person, and building the brand in public across conferences, webinars, and podcasts.
Today, Profound is announcing a first-of-its-kind role: The Marketing Engineer.
And I'm becoming Profound's Founding Marketing Engineer.
A Marketing Engineer isn't an ops person. They're part builder, part marketer. They sit inside your marketing team and build the AI agents, automations, and data infrastructure that let everyone else do their highest-leverage work. And that’s exactly the kind of work I love doing.
The Marketing Engineer serves the marketing function. Sales got RevOps. Go-to-market got the GTM Engineer. It’s long overdue for marketing to have its own role.
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.
The Marketing Engineer changes that, giving the rest of the team something rare: permission to focus. On taste. On creativity. On the slow, deliberate, deeply human work of building a brand people remember.
I didn't want a Head of Marketing job. I wanted this one. And I'm grateful to Trevor and James Cadwallader for believing in me to help bring this new role to the world.
My role is unique. Not only will I be doing the work, but I will be talking about the entire process. What I’m building, what I’m learning, and what it’s like to travel around the world talking about how AI is changing marketing right now.
The era of the Marketing Engineer starts now.
"Marketers can become better at software development than an engineer can be at marketing."
Austin Lau works in growth marketing at @AnthropicAI. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows where marketing is headed:
"Large language models are so good at coding. It's really democratized access to software development."
"You've been the actual operator for all these marketing functions, and now you have the ability to build the solutions."
"Instead of managing campaigns, you're going to build the agents to manage the whole thing end to end."
Nick Lafferty retweeted
Today @airHQ becomes an agent that can run all your creative tasks for you.
You make the work. Air handles the rest.
throwing a house party for some of the best growth marketing operators in NYC and we officially hit capacity today, unreal @LucyJaneHoyle
sign up for the next one: growthcircuit.club/
"I was kind of late to the curve on slash commands."
Andy McCutcheon works in go-to-market AI at @blocks. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows the Claude Code habit he wishes he'd learned sooner:
"You can do slash context and it will tell you the current context of your current session, or slash model to change the model."
"Basically just the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts."
"I felt like I was super late to the game and I was just a vanilla Claude Code user forever, just pounding away at my keyboard like a caveman."
3 new Marketing Engineer roles, all in AI search:
1. Spring Health - AEO & GEO Lead - $153.5k-$177k
2. Eve - AI Search & Content Growth Marketer - $155k-$175k
3. Intel - Discoverability Lead - $121k-$206k
Even Intel is hiring for it now.
Apply today → marketingengineer.jobs/
ALT Dark mode crop of The Marketing Engineering Job Board homepage showing open Marketing Engineer roles with company logos, locations, and salaries
"Hey, if there's something that needs to get done, you can now do it."
Andy McCutcheon works in go-to-market AI at @blocks. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows how AI changed who can ship:
"The teams have always been shipping as fast as possible, and then in the era of AI, that sort of philosophy really became actionable for everybody else in the company."
"The blockers that existed in the previous world are gone because AI can enable you to completely blow past them."
"How are they going to be able to casually and conversationally say, 'Show me Nick's latest guest on his podcast,' and have that route to the appropriate MCP and get them exactly what they want."
Andy McCutcheon works in go-to-market AI at @blocks. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows what surprised him when building MCPs:
"That was one surprising part in the first couple MCPs I built was fine-tuning those tool function instructions."
"Make them really capable of grabbing those contextual inferences that it should kick in and grab something for the user."
1000+ marketing engineers , the hire of 2026.
Excited to share that @profound University has just passed 1,000 certifications issued!
It's been amazing to see the team grow this from an idea just 6 months ago to a core part of our AI marketing ecosystem.
Today, marketers around the world are being certified across four tracks:
1/ AEO Foundations
2/ AEO Analytics
3/ Marketing Engineering
4/ Agent Engineering
Big congratulations to the team: @JBlyskal, @JoyceBenaich, @ruyymon, @matthew_huo, Ashton Dunn, Eleanor Hooker, Erin Rairdan, and Justin Champion.
"You can start with a web app because you can always extend that capability into an MCP built off of those endpoints."
Andy McCutcheon works in go-to-market AI at @blocks. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows how to take a personal tool multiplayer:
"You understand everything intimately about something that you build, and then you kind of turn it loose on people, and they ask you questions for something that you feel like is obvious."
"That's been a good learning too, stepping back and really being able to receive all of that as the very valuable user feedback that it is."
"It tells you so much about what you have built by the questions that people ask about it."
"You have to be bad at something before you can be good at something."
Andy McCutcheon works in go-to-market AI at @blocks. On The Marketing Engineer, he shows how to start building when the blank page feels intimidating:
"I don't even know where to start, and I'm afraid I'm gonna do it wrong."
"Listen, you're fine. You're totally fine. There's no wrong way to do it, and you have to be bad before you can be good."
"Figure out the best way for AI to extend your creativity."
ElevenLabs grew its webinar pipeline from ~$100K to over $8M in H1.
I sat down with Luke Harries, who leads growth at ElevenLabs, for the latest episode of The Marketing Engineer to dig into the systems behind that growth.
1. Fix the bottlenecks across the whole channel. Their webinar system covers invitations, content, creative, and follow-up. Cover images used to mean waiting days for design.
2. Localization drove $3M in incremental revenue in two months. They worked with a marketer or salesperson in each region to get the prompts right, then used AI to translate ads across text, images, and video.
3. Channel expertise still matters. Luke regrets waiting to hire an SEO specialist. Today, that specialist works with eight engineers to build the system.
The one constant is that every company I've talked to is that Marketing Engineers continue to be a function that enables the rest of the team to do their best work.
Watch the full episode here: youtu.be/P-BuXyQZMi4
“I think marketing engineers are going to catch on a lot more. You’re starting to see companies, especially the ones at the frontier, hiring for these roles.”
@helloitsaustin, @AnthropicAI 's first growth marketer, sat down with me a few weeks ago to chat everything growth, marketing and AI.
“You might see an applied AI role for marketing, but when you read the job description, they’re saying, ‘We’re looking for a marketer here.’ You’re part marketer, part engineer, and your customer is the internal marketing team.”
"The job description basically says, ‘Hey, you’re a marketer. You’ve done this your whole life. Instead of coming in and managing campaigns, you’re going to build agents to manage the whole thing end to end. You’re going to oversee all the orchestration. That’s going to be your job.’”