Is Marketing Becoming an Engineering Job?
- Vincent Grippi
- 7 hours ago
- 6 min read
There’s an article making the rounds on the web claiming that, thanks to AI, marketing is becoming an engineering job. I’ve seen this idea pop up a bit lately, so let’s unpack the argument, look at the facts, and then I’ll give my two cents on whether the future of marketing is engineering, or something else.
Marketing Engineers: Future of Marketing?
The article was published by State of Brand and is titled “Marketing Departments Are Rebuilding Themselves as Engineering Orgs, One Hire at a Time.” The article itself makes 3 central claims...
Claim 1: Marketing's fastest-growing job is an engineering one
The article claims that job postings for go-to-market engineers jumped 205% over the past year. It generously lumps in “marketing engineer” jobs with that stat, even though the stat measured GTM roles only.
So, what are GTM and marketing engineers exactly?
GTM engineers use automation and AI to build go-to-market workflows, like automating lead research and enrichment. They typically sit in RevOps or growth. Clay coined the term in 2023 to describe a role built around the kinds of growth tools it sells. The GTM engineer role is critical to Clay’s own marketing, which is entirely human-driven - more on that later.
The “marketing engineer” concept takes that playbook and applies it to a new set of AI tools. The term was coined by Profound, an AI search platform heavily invested in the AEO/GEO movement it’s helping manufacture. According to Profound, marketing engineers aim to automate everything from content creation and social engagement to interacting with leads - so, basically it's vibe marketing.
Claim 2: The Marketing team structure is changing to be engineering-centric
The article claims marketing teams are overhauling org charts to become “engineering pods.” Under this reorg, marketers now build and manage armies of AI agents that execute most marketing tasks for them.
Claim 3: Marketing campaigns are now obsolete
The article states that marketing campaigns have been replaced by millions of AI agents running millions of hyper-personalized programs for buyers all at once, 24/7, just like the minions from Despicable Me.
Manufactured Narratives in the AI Era
Now, there’s nothing special about this article. It doesn’t have an author and it doesn’t have any receipts to back up all of its bold claims.
So, why call this out? Because it's a textbook case of how biased talking points snowball into narratives that spread like a stomach bug from Taylor Farms lettuce. And when it comes to AI, marketers are eating A LOT of lettuce. Let me show you what I mean…
For starters, State of Brand, is powered by Outlever, an AI-powered content engine that helps companies create their own news sites. That said, this entire article is basically a rewrite of a sponsored article from Martech.org. Its author, Michael Gale, is the only person quoted in the State of Brand article. He’s also the primary source behind all the bold claims in it.
Michael Gale is the CMO of EDB, a company that sells the data infrastructure that marketing engineers would use for their AI agents. As for that 205% hiring boom stat, that came from Bloomberry, a company that sells B2B data to GTM teams. Bloomberry telling us that GTM engineers are booming is the equivalent of Jensen Huang telling us we need more data centers. I’m not saying that stat isn’t real, but it sure as hell doesn’t include marketing engineers like the article states.
Marketing, Engineering, and The Truth in Between
Now that we got that out of the way, I’m going to share my thoughts on all 3 claims.
Is Marketing’s Fastest Growing Job an Engineering Role?
Short answer: No.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the fastest growing role in marketing appears to be the market research analyst, which is projected to grow 7% over the next decade.
I dug through LinkedIn’s job listings myself and found no evidence that marketing engineer roles are booming. Most were contract gigs with wildly inconsistent descriptions, and many didn’t even mention AI. From what I saw, a lot of these roles seem experimental. AI agents are the buzzword of 2026, so it makes sense that marketing teams are kicking the tires on what they can do.
For example, one listing said the role needs to “make our marketing look like the AI company we are,” noting “you are the single point of accountability for whether the system is on.” So, it’s an identity crisis and a fall guy rolled into one job? Sounds fun!
Are Marketing Campaigns Dead?
People hear “campaign” and envision a short-term sprint of content and ads, then everyone goes back to the regular programming. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
What a campaign really is, is the strategic lens that aligns your messaging and marketing activity to your greater business goals. The ability to fire off personalized emails and automated workflows 24/7 has existed for decades and doesn’t even require AI. Even with AI agents, “always on automation” doesn’t mean campaigns are dead.
As a marketing consultant, one of the biggest things I see teams lack is an overarching lens to project all their marketing through. Instead, they spray content and touchpoints everywhere like Rambo and wonder why leads don’t magically appear. Campaigns bring direction to all of that. So no, campaigns aren’t going away.
Will Marketing Become an Engineering Job in the Future?
I’m no psychic, but I’d be willing to bet my cat’s soul on this not being a thing. I’d bet my own soul if I could, but I traded that away when I decided to become a marketing consultant in the first place.
Marketing will never be an engineering job because that’s not what marketing is about. People constantly conflate marketing with content, outreach and ads, but those things are just one part of the marketing process, promotion. The most critical work in marketing is what all that is built on. Research, segmentation, product positioning, differentiation, and so on.
Market research analyst is the fastest-growing marketing role for a reason. Without good research, the marketing process falls apart, no matter what you automate.
Remember Clay, the company that created GTM engineers, the inspiration for marketing engineers? Well, their own Head of Growth, Davide Grieco said it himself: “Your tech stack doesn’t matter. The entire GTM world is obsessing over AI agents and workflows. Meanwhile, the best marketers are doing the opposite. Until we start selling to machines instead of humans, taste > technology.”
I’m not anti-automation or AI, but what the marketing engineer concept gets wrong is how it uses both. It tries to automate what’s fundamentally human: communication, relationship-building, culture, and taste. And audiences aren’t having it.
According to Sprout Social, 50% of Gen Z unfollows, mutes, or blocks brands that share AI-generated content. The biggest media platforms are pushing back on it too. Meanwhile, frontier LLMs are beginning to watermark their outputs to help the public identify them in the wild. The marketing engineer role is swimming against the current here and there are rougher waters ahead.
Let’s not pretend AI Agents are anywhere near capable of doing what the hype suggests. They’re fine when used for simple, low-risk tasks behind the scenes, but fall apart once you try to get advanced.
AI promised to make things cheaper, faster, and leaner. Hiring full-time staff to push fragile agents past their limits, then hold them accountable when those agents inevitably fall short, sounds like none of those things. That’s like me firing my editor because he can’t magically remove my lisp from these videos!
We’ve all read the MIT report that found 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. A key reason is because companies dump their AI budgets into marketing and sales, two disciplines that rely on the human touch, when the proven ROI is found in backoffice work instead. Meaningful ROI in marketing automation is far less sexy than what the loudest voices on YouTube suggest.
If we can’t generate significant ROI from these tools in marketing, how are we supposed to measure ROI for the roles built around them?
Remember, the real cost of AI is still being subsidized and regulations are lagging in the US, which makes that whole ROI thing even more of a moving target.
Are Marketing Engineers a Thing of the Moment or Are They Here to Stay?
Unless marketing engineers evolve to rely less on unreliable tools and stop trying to automate the un-automate-able, I don’t see the role becoming a long-term fixture on every marketing team.
What’s more likely is that, like with CRMs, analytics, and design, marketers will learn the fundamentals themselves, then bring in outside help for more sophisticated projects.
If you're just starting your marketing career, I strongly suggest learning the fundamentals and the full marketing process.
That’s not to say AI can’t help in these areas. In fact, you should upskill in AI and automation enough to know where it works and where it doesn't.
Having worked with these tools extensively, I’ve seen just how wide the gap between hype and reality is. Right now companies are experimenting to see for themselves, and the marketing engineer role is part of that.
Ironically, another job emerging from all this is AI cleanup. Grippi Media has taken on several contracts this year cleaning up messes made by teams that got too ambitious with AI, especially in SEO, which is literally where the marketing engineer role originated.
Maybe these tools and roles survive the AI hype and become commonplace, or maybe they don’t. Regardless, one thing won’t change: marketing will never be an engineering job.
