The hottest new job category to emerge in the startup world recently is GTM (Go-To-Market) engineering — a pivotal role that automates complex data pipelines to transform how companies handle sales and marketing. Clay, the flagship New York SaaS startup that popularized the concept and rocketed to a $5 billion valuation, shows exactly how it defined and deployed this innovative role. The organic synergy between an "internal GTM team" that builds out the company's own systems and a "forward-deployed GTM team" that designs tailored solutions on the sales front lines is the real secret behind Clay's hypergrowth. 📈

1. The Startup World's New Secret Weapon: the 'GTM Engineer'

Recently, a new job category has been rapidly rising to prominence, especially among hypergrowth startups. In fact, over the past year, job postings for this role have surged by more than 5,000%. That role is the GTM (Go-To-Market) engineer. 🚀

It can sound a little unfamiliar at first. Is it engineering? Marketing? Or sales? Is it someone doing internal work, or someone dealing with external customers? It's hard to pin down. To unravel this mystery, host Payton visited the New York office of Clay, the startup that established and popularized the concept of this role.

Founded in 2017, Clay grew in just a few years into a platform that supports the GTM teams of world-class companies like Anthropic and Google, and it is now valued at $5 billion. Payton decided to shadow a day in the life of Everett Berry, Clay's head of GTM engineering, to get to the bottom of what this role really is.

Everett's day begins on the commuter train from New Jersey into New York. Quickly writing a LinkedIn post before the internet signal cuts out and prepping for an afternoon training session, he looked every bit the seasoned pro. 🚂

"The trick to this commute is making good use of those moments when the cellular signal flickers in and out. You have to get everything you need ready in advance before the signal drops."

Having safely finished his LinkedIn post on the train, Everett tossed a cheerful joke at the camera.

"When people ask me what my goal at Clay is, I tell them it's 'to become famous.'"

2. Understanding the Essence of GTM Engineering Through Pickles

The moment he arrived at the office, Everett dove into a meeting with his colleagues. As specialized jargon came flying, a bewildered Payton wandered around the office and interviewed another GTM engineer, Spencer. Spencer, too, was well aware of how unfamiliar this role is to outsiders. 😂

"If you're trying to explain this in a video, you're probably going to have a really hard time."

But Spencer soon offered a clever and intuitive 'pickle analogy' to explain what GTM engineering does in very simple terms. 🥒

"Let's say we're a company that makes pickles. To grow the business, you have to think about 'who are our customers, and how can we find more of them?' If you make pickles in New York City, you need to build a list of every deli in New York. Then you analyze which ones could become our customers to figure out who you should actually be selling to. You find the final decision-maker most likely to buy delicious pickles, and then you sell them pickles."

That's exactly what a GTM engineer does. They gather messy, scattered data about prospects, track interest signals like records of visits to our website, and analyze buying behavior. And instead of doing all of this manually like in the old days, they build it into a single automated system. Clay is a powerful tool that helps you build exactly that kind of system easily and without coding. 🛠️

3. From Five Years of Zero Revenue to Breaking $100 Million: Clay's Growth Story

Co-founder Varun, whom Payton happened to run into on the office stairs, shared the fascinating behind-the-scenes story of how Clay got to where it is today. The truth is, Clay's beginnings were extremely slow and rough. For the first five years after it was founded, there was essentially almost no revenue at all. 😢

"For a while, really nothing was happening."

But they didn't give up, and they found a decisive idea — namely, the thought: "What if we freely scraped all the data on the internet and displayed it in spreadsheet form?" Finally, in February 2022, they officially launched on the product discovery platform Product Hunt and confirmed an enthusiastic market response.

In particular, they witnessed technically savvy, inventive marketers and operators using the tool to build automated systems for finding and connecting with customers. Clay evolved beyond a simple data tool into a 'system for finding, understanding, and communicating with the right people.' On top of that, the artificial intelligence (AI) wave that swept in at the end of 2022 gave Clay wings. Thanks to AI, they could now automate not just data collection but also the sending of hyper-personalized outbound email messages, all in one go.

In March 2023, when the well-known HR management platform Rippling joined as a major customer, Clay crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). 📈

But heading into 2024, a new challenge arose. Startups used Clay well, but conservative enterprises were not so quick to open their wallets. The product was too complex for large enterprises to use, and the technical barriers were too high. Yet they couldn't simply hire traditional salespeople either, because they needed someone who fully understood the product and could demonstrate it technically.

So Varun made an unexpected offer to Everett, a power user in the Clay community and a former engineer: "Why don't you try doing sales?" At the time, Everett's honest reaction was this:

"I said, 'First of all, I'm more of an engineer, and second, I'm more of a growth marketing person — and you want me to do sales...?' Sales just felt kind of icky to me."

But Varun was resolute.

"No, there's a new area called 'GTM engineering.'"

In his first six months after joining, Everett didn't close a single deal. But gradually he found his breakthrough. Instead of the typical sales approach of just explaining product features, he chose to perfectly diagnose the data-management problems a customer had and to design a solution for them right on the spot using Clay (a Proof of Concept, or POC). 💡

This strategy was a huge success. By the end of 2024, he had landed global tech companies like Figma and OpenAI as customers, and in 2025, revenue broke $100 million. And as of 2026, Clay has become a massive unicorn with more than 16,000 enterprise customers.

4. Meetings All Day Long! The Real Daily Life of a GTM Engineer

Everett's day runs at a breakneck pace. Internal meetings followed one after another so relentlessly that host Payton even lost track of him at one point. 🏃‍♂️

"I've lost Everett. He's such a busy guy that I'll have to go find where he went."

Having barely escaped the meeting room, Everett heads out with Payton for an outdoor meeting at Madison Square Park. It was an important occasion to meet with a contact from their customer AWS (Amazon Web Services), strengthen the business relationship, and hear out their pain points.

The three core competencies that the GTM engineering team Everett leads must absolutely have in order to succeed are as follows:

1. A deep understanding of GTM (Go-to-Market) strategy
2. Complete technical mastery of the Clay platform
3. Excellent sales instincts that can persuade customers

George, a fellow GTM engineer, added the following about the background to how this role came to be. 🤝

"Usually, when a new role gets created, it's to solve a problem you're facing. We wanted to actually implement Clay for our customers."

5. The Magical Synergy of Two GTM Teams and the Growth Flywheel

So what is the real engine driving Clay's business? According to Everett's explanation, there are two GTM engineering teams inside Clay, each playing a different role.

① Internal GTM Engineering Team (Internal GTM Team)

This is the team that builds, in-house, the pipeline system that generates the company's revenue. It's made up not of ordinary marketers or operations staff, but of technical engineers. They build the IT infrastructure that maximizes Clay's internal marketing and sales efficiency — outbound sales automation, lead generation and scoring systems, automated content creation, and more.

② Forward-Deployed GTM Engineering Team (Forward-Deployed GTM Team)

This team, led by Everett, is in simple terms a 'technically oriented sales team.' When a high-quality prospect (a large enterprise) sourced by the internal team is matched, they are deployed directly. They diagnose the problems in the customer's tech stack and data pipelines, pre-build a tailored solution system with Clay, and close the deal by proving it right before the customer's eyes.

These two teams mesh organically with each other to form a powerful growth flywheel.

"This is a huge flywheel. As we use Clay to help our customers, we come to deeply understand what they do with Clay, and we bring that learning back to our own team so we can do even cooler things."

For example, if someone says, "Our CEO is traveling to San Francisco, and we want to gather the 20 most impactful prospect decision-makers locally for a dinner," the GTM engineers use the systems they've designed to instantly extract a target list for that specific city, automatically send out invitations under the CEO's name, and even manage RSVPs in a real-time table. This system, too, was built by the GTM engineers themselves.

6. Closing

Clay didn't just stop at coining a new job title, 'GTM engineer' — they proved its value themselves. It was the perfect combination of an internal GTM team that streamlines internal processes and a forward-deployed GTM team that quenches customers' technical thirst on the spot that made the $5 billion hypergrowth possible.

After wrapping up the day's work, Payton moved on to Everett's favorite local pub and, as the video's final mission, took on the challenge of tasting a pickle for the first time in his life. 🥒

"Uh... I'm not really sure what it tastes like. Can I get some water?"

In the end, the pickle apparently wasn't to his liking, but the possibility of GTM engineering that Clay has shown the world will surely be remembered as a flavor more intense and captivating than that of any other startup. 🚀