54% of the Fastest Growing B2B SaaS Companies have a GTM Engineer

Research Report by The Signal

Apr 23, 2026

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Hey, y’all! 👋

Another dizzying week in AI-land. Anthropic launched Claude Design (60M videos on their launch video on X is bonkers), and allegedly killed Figma overnight (its stock was down 8% on the news). And SpaceX announced a deal with Cursor, for the right to acquire it for $60B later this year, or to pay $10B for work they’re doing together. The companies said they’ll collaborate to build “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI.” (Oh, and SBF would have been up 15,000x on his investment in Cursor, totaling $114B had the FTX holdings not been sold in a fire sale.)

I can’t keep up. But, keep up, we must. Speaking of…

Every company knows they should be using AI in their go-to-market org. The fastest-growing companies have at least one person dedicated to this role.

Yesterday, while eating my lunch, I was listening to the latest 20VC podcast, and when Aaron Levie went on this rant (clip below), I was screaming “that’s a GTM Engineer!” (or AI Ops. Or <whatever you want to call it>).

The point is, the smartest companies have someone helping their GTM team build leverage through systems, automation, and AI. Instead of just scaling with headcount.

Listen to the 40-second clip below:

It’s different than traditional JTBD of a RevOps person (though this person could sit under the RevOps org).

So, naturally, I went down a rabbit hole that led me to our second Research Report by The Signal.

Here’s the punchline:

→ 54% of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies have ≥1 GTM Engineer.

Here’s what’s in today’s Research Report:

The surface-level count is a trap
The hidden bench of (GTME) talent
If you’re hiring one
Top technologies in GTME job postings
The companies without a GTM Engineer
What I think happens next

Alright, let’s get into it.

The surface-level count is a trap

The title “GTM Engineer” is the newest, shiniest label, but the function has existed under different names at Stripe, Ramp, Databricks, and others for a while. Clay didn’t invent the job. But they did standardize the name.

I pulled the numbers across 63 of the fastest-growing SaaS companies I track (OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Ramp, Notion, Databricks, Cursor, Vercel, Webflow, Plaid, and 53 others). When I filtered on the literal “GTM Engineer” title, only 10 companies showed up. That’s the story most people believe: “GTM Engineer” is a Clay phenomenon, everyone else has one token hire at most.

That story is wrong. Once I looked at the actual work instead of the label, 34 of 63 companies have someone doing GTM Engineering today.

When I ran the strict title search first, here’s what came back: Clay (20), Vercel (2), Webflow (2), 1Password, Abnormal, Anthropic, Canva, Databricks, Descript, Miro (1 each).

If I stopped there, the story would be “Clay invented a role nobody else has really adopted.” That’s what most people say when they dismiss GTM Engineers as a fad. It’s also why most hiring managers still think of this as an experiment rather than a new role that is necessary to scale an AI-native GTM org.

But the word “engineer” is doing a lot of work in that title. The companies that have been doing this for years didn’t use the term “GTM Engineer.” They’d often be called “Growth Engineers.”

The hidden bench of (GTME) talent

When I dropped the strict title match and looked at any combination of “GTM” plus “engineer” or “engineering” (regardless of phrasing), the picture changed completely. Shout-out to Sumble, inside Claude Code, for helping me wrangle this data.

A few examples of adjacent titles found:

GTM Systems Engineer, Senior Engineer / Member of GTM Team, GTM Field Readiness Engineer, Senior GTM Systems Engineer, Data Engineering Manager – GTM, Data Science Manager – GTM, Lead Analytics Engineer for Marketing and Sales, Analytics Engineer – GTM, and GTM Systems Engineer.

If we add in Growth Engineers (Stripe, Supabase, Grafana Labs, HeyGen, Figma, Monte Carlo, Postman, Scribe) and the Hightouch/Fireworks-style “GTM & Growth | Data and AI” ICs where the word “engineer” doesn’t appear in the title, but the work obviously is, it adds another 14 companies (we’ll call these “Tier 2”), and brings the total to 34 companies.

If you’re hiring one

Stop screening by a specific title. The best candidates for a GTM Engineer role right now are often titled Analytics Engineer, Growth Engineer, GTM Systems Engineer, or Data Engineer on a revenue-adjacent team. They maybe haven’t ever applied to a “GTM Engineer” role because the title didn’t exist when they took their current one.

The skills that matter: SQL, API integrations, comfort with tools like Clay and Claude Code, ability to read a GTM motion end-to-end.

If you’re looking for a framework on when to hire a GTM Engineer, I wrote about that last April. The short version: if you have a manual playbook that’s working today, a GTM Engineer can help you scale it. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is that you have a much bigger candidate pool than “people with the exact title.”

The companies without a GTM Engineer

29 of the 63 fastest-growing private B2B SaaS companies still don’t have a GTM Engineer.

Some are genuinely early-stage (Decagon, Abridge). Some are running lean PLG motions without many sellers.

And others have the role dispersed in other places. For example, I asked Kyle Norton, CRO of Owner, if I was missing something in the research I did, and he told me: “We have people doing the GTME jobs to be done but we don’t call it that. It’s Applied AI and Data Science doing it.”

What I think happens next

Again, 54% of the fastest-growing private B2B SaaS companies have a GTM Engineer.

That’s a pretty wild stat, considering only between 3-7% of private B2B SaaS companies have at least one GTM Engineer on staff (with the lower bound applying when you insist on the literal job title and the upper bound when you include adjacent Growth Engineer and GTM-scoped RevOps Engineer roles). This collapses to <1% at seed/Series A and rises to 8%+ at scale-up and enterprise SaaS. [Source]

This means the fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies are an order of magnitude more likely to have at least one GTM Engineer in-house.

In 12 months, it’s likely the industry will converge on a single title. Maybe “GTM Engineer.” Or GTM Architect, Growth Eng, or something else.

But semantics (on the title) aside, I predict this chart continues to grow over time.

GTM Engineer job postings by year (2022–2026):

Source: Sumble job posting index · GTM Engineer job function.

*Note: 2026 projection is 826 postings through day 112 of 365, linearly extrapolated to a full-year run-rate of ~2,692. Actual full-year total will vary with hiring seasonality.

The category went from nonexistent to one of the fastest-growing GTM roles in three years.

Every company knows they should be using AI in their go-to-market org to scale without adding too much headcount.

54% of the fastest-growing companies have at least one GTM Engineer—someone dedicated to helping their GTM team build leverage through systems, automation, and AI.

Let’s see what this data looks like in a year. (Or who knows, maybe by then ASI is here, and none of this will matter anyway.)

As always, thank you for your attention and trust. I do not take it for granted.

PS

↳ ICYMI, our first Research Report was on: The GTM Tech Stacks of the Fastest-Growing Private B2B Companies. Find the most up-to-date data here: ProspectStack.com/top-tech-stacks. I hope it’s helpful!

See you next time,
Brendan 🫡

The Signal

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