GTM Engineer Salary and How to Become One in 2026

Three months after starting his GTM engineering agency, Kaan Un already has two clients and more potential customers in his pipeline. He believes the emerging role could offer a six-figure career path for people who can combine technical skills with sales and marketing knowledge.

Kaan estimates that GTM engineers in the US earn between $135,000 and $220,000 a year, with prominent practitioners potentially earning more. For people running agencies, he says the earning potential can be considerably higher, although agency work comes with less job security.

“Right now, I would say, it is around six figures what a GTM engineer makes in a company,” he says. “For a GTM engineering agency, it goes a lot higher than that.”

GTM engineering is still new enough that he did not initially set out to build a career around it. He came across the role while teaching B2B founders how to use sales and marketing tools.

Who is a GTM engineer?

Kaan began running Clay Club events around January with a friend from HubSpot. The idea was to teach people how to use the tools needed to run outbound campaigns for their B2B businesses.

“What we originally envisioned with that is, just teach the tools that people need to learn when they want to do outbound for their B2B business,” he says.

After running the events, he realised the work he was teaching already had a name.

“What I started, I figured out I was doing something called GTM engineer,” he says.

The role sits around the systems that connect sales and marketing activities. Kaan describes it as the automation behind things such as email campaigns, LinkedIn outreach, newsletters, and customer notifications.

“We’re gonna do email campaigns or, like, we’re gonna reach out to this person on LinkedIn. We’re gonna start doing this. We’re gonna do different newsletters and everything,” he says, adding that, “all of this, if you put this into automation, if you use tools, it’s called GTM engineering.”

That can begin before a salesperson ever contacts a potential customer.

“We find the right people. The lead generation is properly set in place,” Kaan says. “Or like, if people are coming to our website, signing up for different articles, signing up for a blog and everything, how do we keep these leads and how do we reach out to them?”

“All of this and the systems behind it enter into GTM engineering territory.”

The role is part of a broader group of technical positions that have emerged as companies use more software to handle business development. Kaan recalls GTM engineering as a relatively new role, alongside other emerging positions he mentions, forward-deployed engineering.

“One of them being GTM engineering, the other one being forward-deployed engineer,” he listed, stating that “these are really highly leveraged roles as of 2026.”