DEAR STAGE 2: My feed is full of "GTM engineer" hype. Is this a role I actually need to hire? And how do I make sure I find the right fit? ~ENGINEERING GTM
DEAR ENGINEERING GTM: Let me start with a slightly spicy take: the “GTM engineer” is pretty much just rev ops. Anyone who did rev ops well (aka not order-taking/administrative) was already doing a lot of this work: instrumenting the funnel, wiring the tools together, running go-to-market like a system instead of a gut feel, and acting as a strategic partner. But AI has given this role real leverage. Title aside, you probably need the function, and the real questions are 1) when and 2) how to make the right hire for your unique setup.
When I saw this question come in, I immediately thought of Kyle Henson, founder of Arda (a Stage 2 Portfolio company). Kyle recently hired a GTM Engineer and he graciously agreed to take you through their journey:
When is the right time to bring in a GTM Engineer?
The “why now?” for Arda happened when the teammate who was driving top of funnel went on paternity leave last year, and Arda didn’t close a single sale that month. Their entire pipeline generation motion lived with one person, which was a glaring single point of failure in their GTM motion. Kyle got to work building with Unify and Clay, and put together a scrappy two-touch sequence, and …it worked. But he needed the motion to run without his involvement.
It’s time to start thinking about this hire once you’re seeing signs of your go-to-market working and you need to turn it into a system.
Scope the GTM Engineer role as a builder, not a report-runner
Kyle’s north star is a fully hands-off funnel for SMB manufacturers, and that means someone needs to own orchestration, testing, and optimization.
Kyle wanted “a scrum master for our go-to-market motion,” someone to run GTM like a product practice: form a hypothesis, build it, measure it, kill it, repeat. Two non-negotiables: fluency with tools like Clay and Unify, and the ability to vibe-code. At a recent conference, instead of buying the overpriced lead-retrieval app, his hire bought API access and built a purpose-built tool on top of it for a fraction of the cost - that exemplifies the job.
Write a GTM Engineer job description that actually attracts builders
Kyle wrote a job description that covered the standard elements of the role. But he also added an unconventional line at the end: “the best candidates will likely proactively figure out how to get our attention.” Applicants took this seriously. One person built a Yelp scraper to surface local manufacturers who aren’t on LinkedIn, a channel Kyle hadn’t even mentioned. Beyond creative and shows real initiative.
The final step in the interview was a paid project. Kyle paid the finalist for a day of work as a contractor, gave them HubSpot access, and worked together on a real problem. There are two things about this approach that I particularly liked: First, Kyle aligned on scope with a quick call before the candidate started, so nobody burned time moving in the wrong direction. Second, the prompts were vague on purpose - that’s the real test. Kyle wanted to understand how candidates would work in an ambiguous environment.
Here are three actual scenarios Kyle challenged the candidate to problem-solve:
Scenario 1: “I just landed in [CITY] at [CONFERENCE]. I want to text attendees of the conference and tell them to stop by the booth while the conference is going on. Didn’t have the bandwidth to prep that.”
Scenario 2: “We want to incorporate texting into outbound. We pay for it on HubSpot. Haven’t set it up.”
Scenario 3: “During [CONFERENCE] last year we had the conference send an email blast that got a lot of opens. We got a ton of email addresses and did nothing with them because we were wall-to-wall with demos for three weeks after the show.”
Notice what these have in common: each is a real, unfinished job, there’s no guidance or instructions, and there’s no “right” answer.
I wish more founders and hiring managers would approach designing hiring exercises this way. Your scenarios don’t need to be fully scoped problems. Some of the best tests are ones where you’re not even sure if the work is worth doing. For example, one scenario floated texting as a channel, hoping the candidate would either run with it or push back with a reason. Drew (the eventual hire!), pushed back with a clear “not right for us now, here’s why.” That’s the kind of relationship Kyle was looking for. Drew wasn’t an order-taker and brought real opinions to the table that were backed by experience.
How a paid working session can reveal the right GTM Engineer
A working session does something that interviews can’t: it can show you who acts like part of the team even before they’re hired. Before Drew’s paid project officially kicked off with the prompts above, he’d already been in the systems and come back with feedback. Just a few examples he actually sent:
Broken Workflow: One sequence wasn’t firing at full volume because a misconfiguration was excluding its own audience. He caught it and fixed it.
Dropped Leads: A live prospect had replied, and there was no trail of a follow-up in either HubSpot or Unify. A real, potentially good account was…ghosted. He flagged it as a symptom of broken field mappings between the two tools and proposed a bidirectional sync.
Missed Opportunity: He started scrubbing the dormant conference lists, found about a third of the contacts fell outside ICP, and proposed a Unify play built around what the team learned at the event to route the rest into free trials.
He literally did the job: found the leaks, built the plays, closed the loops. You cannot get this from a resume or a “walk me through your funnel” conversation.
My advice? Don’t hire “a GTM engineer” just because your feed told you to. Instead, look at your own funnel and identify gaps and who can move the needle the fastest. Then make sure you scope the role as a builder who owns outcomes, screen with a paid project, and give them the leeway to make a real impact from day one.
Until next week!
Agreed that it is rev ops with better leverage, and I would add a cost test to the timing question. The tools this role wires together have stopped pricing per seat. Zylo tracked 40 million SaaS licences and $75 billion of spend this year: 36% of licences sit unused, 78% of IT leaders received a bill they never forecast, and 61% killed projects to pay it. When one vendor charges per resolution and another per conversation, a wired-together funnel becomes a variable cost that scales with volume, and the person who wired it is the only one who can reconstruct the invoice. So the hiring trigger is less about pipeline complexity and more about the first month your GTM stack produces a number nobody in the room can explain. Before that point, a good rev ops contractor covers it.
The part that landed for me is Kyle's pipeline going dark the moment one person took leave. That is the actual signal to hire, not the GTM engineer label. And the paid working session with a deliberately vague scenario beats any structured interview, because in GTM you are not hiring someone to answer questions well, you are hiring someone who keeps moving when the brief is unclear. I have watched "great interviewers" freeze the first time a real deal went sideways.