Clay puts the GTM engineer center stage at Disrupt 2026

The role that didn't exist two years ago

Two years ago almost no company employed a GTM engineer; today the title appears on job boards at a rate of roughly a hundred new openings a month. Kareem Amin, Clay's co-founder and chief executive, will take the AI stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to explain how artificial intelligence turned the concept into a bona fide profession. His talk, "The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech's Next Big Job Category," will map the shift from a stack of manual tools to automated systems that run the revenue cycle end to end.

What a GTM engineer actually does

Classic go-to-market work demands hours of account research, data cleansing, lead filtering, outreach writing and shuffling information between disconnected systems. GTM engineers use language models, data warehouses and automation to turn that sequence into a repeatable, measurable process. Clay coined the term in 2023 and defines the role as someone who builds automated revenue workflows instead of executing individual tasks by hand. Companies already hiring for the position include Cursor, Lovable and Webflow.

From Clay to automated research with Claygent

The company started in Brooklyn in 2017 with a simple goal: make programming power accessible to non-developers. The original spreadsheet let users connect data sources and run automations without writing code. When sales, growth and agency teams adopted the tool for prospecting, Clay followed them into the GTM world. Today it provides infrastructure for data access, agentic workflows and campaign launches. The Claygent agent, built on OpenAI models, automatically handles research and outreach for sales, marketing and recruiting teams.

Rapid growth and fellowship funding

The evolution came with a sharp commercial inflection. In February TechCrunch reported that the company had tripled annual recurring revenue to $100 million in a year and announced an employee tender offer at a $5 billion valuation. In September a $115 million Series D arrived at a $7.1 billion valuation. At the same time Clay launched a $1 million fellowship fund to train GTM engineers, a direct investment in the category Amin will discuss on stage.

The choice between more hands and smarter systems

For founders and GTM leaders the practical question is straightforward: add people to run the existing process, or build systems that let the current team work differently. Amin's talk aims to lay out the framework for that decision and demonstrate what AI-native GTM operations look like in practice. Anyone building a company or rethinking sales, marketing and growth will find a role that barely existed a few years ago and is already changing how revenue teams operate.