My take on the marketing engineer (for now)
Profound coined a role. LinkedIn lost its mind. Here is my take.
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Last week, Profound introduced a new role to the marketing world:
The Marketing Engineer
And, as usual, LinkedIn went ballistic.
My feed was flooded with hot takes.
Some people loved it. Others hated it. And one person pointed out that the term has existed since 1959.
Many of you reached out to tell me you liked my take on the content engineer.
So, I thought I’d do a similar piece for this one.
What Happened
James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO of Profound, published a post announcing that the company was formalizing the Marketing Engineer as a new role.
Nick Lafferty, Profound’s first marketing hire, became the Founding Marketing Engineer.
The first person to hold that title at a company fully behind it.
According to Cadwallader’s post, Marketing Engineers build agents that monitor media coverage and flag sentiment shifts, track competitor moves and rewrite battlecards, and turn webinars into brand-voice articles queued for review.
Part builder, part strategist.
Profound also launched a free course through Profound University to teach people how to become Marketing Engineers.
Three modules covering systems thinking, agent building, and operating as an engineer inside a marketing team.
This happened approximately two months after Profound announced its $96 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. (Read: the timing was not accidental)
This Is Not New
The concept of a marketing engineer is not new.
Phil Gamache, founder of Humans of Martech, shared an interesting post on LinkedIn, where he cited an academic paper from 1959 by H.G. Burger titled “The Need for Marketing Engineering,” published in the Journal of Marketing.
This was in 1959, so the term is 67 years old.
But the broader pattern here is even more important:
Tech companies have been coining role names for years to create categories around their products.
HubSpot coined the Inbound Marketer
Clay coined the GTM Engineer
Drift popularized the Conversational Marketer
AirOps popularized the Content Engineer
And now Profound is introducing the Marketing Engineer
Every single one of these terms was born from the same playbook.
The Playbook
What most of these companies are actually doing is that they are running a brand strategy play disguised as a talent movement.
The sequence is somewhat familiar:
You build a product
You realize the product needs a certain role (or skillset) to operate it well
You give that role a name
You build a course or certification around that name
You create a manifesto and introduce the role
You hire for the role internally to show that you lead by example
Then you watch as other companies start posting the same role title in their own job listings (and, sure enough, they will)
Profound followed this playbook step by step.
They announced the role —> They launched the course —> They gave Nick Lafferty the title of Founding Marketing Engineer
And within days, Marvin Chow, a marketing executive at Google, posted that he was hiring their first Marketing Engineer too. He called it “the hire of 2026.”
That is the goal.
When other companies start hiring for the role you named, you own the category.
Why This Name
Here’s the thing.
Profound couldn’t use “Content Engineer” because AirOps already owns that term.
They couldn’t use “GTM Engineer” because Clay already owns that one.
And neither term really fits what Profound does anyway.
Profound is positioning itself as a platform, not a point solution for content.
Their product touches AI search tracking, competitive intelligence, agent workflows and more.
They needed a term broad enough to cover all of that.
“Marketing Engineer” gives them room. It sounds bigger than content, more strategic than operations.
It positions the person using the product as someone who builds systems. Not someone who runs campaigns.
In my view, most of what a Marketing Engineer would theoretically do, according to Profound’s own description, the product cannot fully support today.
Agents that monitor media coverage, rewrite battlecards, draft journalist outreach?
As I see it, that is where they want to take the product.
The role is already out there, ahead of the roadmap.
That is smart marketing.
You define the destination before you ship the vehicle.
The LinkedIn Reaction
The response was mixed. (Predictably so!)
The enthusiasts
Josh Grant, who’s an ex-VP Growth at Webflow, called it “The Great Convergence.”
His argument: every major function already has an engineering layer.
Finance has financial engineering
Data has data engineering
Sales has sales engineering
Marketing was the last one standing without one.
The skeptics
Geoffrey Lyman, a full-stack marketing leader, responded with a simple question:
What am I missing? This is no different than a GTM Engineer, just branded for marketers.
His point was that good marketing operators have always done these things.
They just have better tools now.
The critical thinkers
Miranda Shanahan, a brand consultant, posted a TikTok that drew historical parallels.
She pointed out that engineering is one of the most male-dominated workforces in America, while marketing is led by women.
Her take: marketing jobs are being rebranded with technical-sounding titles, and the implications of that deserve more scrutiny.
Fast Company picked up the story.
The system thinkers
Mayur Gupta, who leads growth at Kraken (formerly at Spotify), posted that marketing and engineering must be inseparable.
His framing was less about the title and more about the skill set:
Marketers have to be system thinkers now, building ideas rooted in AI-native systems.
Each perspective has merit.
But I think most people are missing the bigger picture.
My Take (For Now)
I give Profound credit for the marketing execution.
They generated buzz
They got a Google exec to post about hiring the same role
They launched a course
Created a manifesto
Companies will soon be posting “Marketing Engineer” job ads
That is category creation done well.
But let’s be honest about what this is:
It is a brand play. And a very effective one.
And let me be emphatic about this:
And there is nothing wrong with that.
HubSpot did the same thing with “inbound marketing” and built a $30 billion company around it.
What concerns me is something different.
Something I keep coming back to every time a new “engineer” title drops in the marketing world.
All this engineering-focused language around marketing and go-to-market jobs tends to take away creativity. (Stay with me.)
It turns the role of marketing into something deterministic.
As if the entire discipline can be reduced to systems, workflows and agents.
Marketing is not engineering.
The best marketing has always come from taste, intuition and creative risk.
Systems can support that work.
They can scale it.
But they cannot replace the part that makes marketing actually work:
The human agency that no agent can replicate
When you call someone an engineer, you are framing their job as building systems.
You are telling them that the value they create comes from technical infrastructure.
That framing subtly pushes out the people who are great at the creative, messy, human side of marketing.
The storytellers. The brand builders.
The people who can feel what an audience wants before any data confirms it.
I wrote about this a few weeks ago, in the context of the Content Engineer.
The same concerns apply here, maybe even more so.
Because marketing engineering is broader.
It implies the entire marketing function should think in systems.
Some of it should. A lot of it should not.
The Real Question
The question I keep asking myself is this: who does the “engineer” framing actually serve?
1. It serves the software companies
Because if your job is to be an engineer, you need engineering tools.
You need Profound. You need Clay. You need AirOps.
You need a platform, a certification and a community built around that platform.
Author’s Note: To be clear, I’m not implying that this is wrong. I’m using, paying for, and working with some of these companies.
2. It serves the marketers who are already technical
The ones who code, build automations and architect workflows.
They get a title that validates what they have been doing.
3. It serves the marketplace
When a new role, such as marketing engineer, is introduced, there are always new opportunities that emerge.
Fundamentally that’s a good thing and it benefits the marketplace.
But do the introduction of these roles or skillsets serve the marketing discipline as a whole? Yeah, I am not so sure about that.
Because beyond all the LinkedIn buzz, there is a philosophical question:
Do we really want marketing to be an engineering discipline? Do we want to train the next generation of marketers to think of themselves merely as system builders and not as creative thinkers?
My answer, for now, is no.
I think the best marketers will always be the ones who can hold both.
Who can build the system and know when to override it.
Who can set up the automation and also write the headline that makes someone stop scrolling.
Calling that person an engineer captures half the picture.
The half that is easier to sell software for.
Final Thoughts
Every few months, a new role name drops…
GTM Engineer
Content Engineer
Marketing Engineer
Each time, LinkedIn lights up.
People debate whether the title is necessary, whether the skills are real.
To a certain extent, what’s happening is this:
Software companies are racing to name the person who will buy their product.
That is the game.
The role name is the marketing. The certification is the lead gen. The manifesto is the content strategy.
None of that is cynical. It is just brand marketing. And I respect the craft behind it.
But I would also encourage anyone reading this to separate the brand play from the career advice.
The skills these roles describe are real.
Systems thinking, automation, AI-native workflows: these are worth learning.
You do not need a new job title to learn them.
And you definitely do not need to abandon the creative, human side of marketing to adopt them.
Build the systems. Learn the tools. But do not let anyone convince you that marketing is just engineering.
It is something bigger than that.
Thank you for reading today’s note, and see you again next week.
Research Disclaimers and Limitations
GrowthWaves and its author are not sponsored by or compensated by any company mentioned in this note. This is independent editorial analysis and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. The author may have relationships with, work with, or hold equity in companies referenced; however, no content in this piece was influenced, commissioned, or incentivized by any such relationship. AI tools were used as a research assistant in the preparation of this piece. All claims are sourced and linked throughout.
Sources
James Cadwallader, LinkedIn post announcing the Marketing Engineer
Nick Lafferty, LinkedIn post on becoming Founding Marketing Engineer
Josh Grant, LinkedIn post on The Great Convergence
Marvin Chow, LinkedIn post on hiring a Marketing Engineer at Google
Mayur Gupta, LinkedIn post on marketing and engineering convergence
Phil Gamache, LinkedIn post citing the 1959 marketing engineering paper
Miranda Shanahan, TikTok on gender dynamics of engineering-coded job titles
Fast Company, “There’s a curious phenomenon happening in the marketing industry”
Profound University, Marketing Engineering Course
Burger, H.G. (1959), “The Need for Marketing Engineering,” Journal of Marketing, 23(3)