Introducing the Marketing Engineer: The new role in marketing, born from AI.

The hire every marketing team is about to compete for. Here's what it is and how to land it

There’s a list on my desk of work that should be automated and isn’t.

Customer reviews from four sales channels manually pulled into a sentiment doc once a month. Our content being pulled into our email designs. A weekly business recap drafted from scratch every time, even though the numbers come from the same five places every week. The pipes between marketing systems that should exist and don’t.

I could build some of these. I have the tools. I have the access. I even have the time on Sundays. The bigger problem is the ones I haven’t even noticed yet. The workflows that don’t exist that should.

But I keep not building them. Because I’m running marketing.

What I keep thinking, every week, is some version of the same thing. I don’t need another marketer. I don’t need another developer. I need someone in the middle. Someone whose job is to find the work that should be automated, build the pipes between the systems we already have, and surface the workflows nobody on my team has even thought to ask for yet.

Last Monday I wrote about marketing jobs disappearing. The piece scared people. A lot of people told me I was wrong. Hey that’s ok! It’s an opinion piece right?

But regardless of what you thought about my last article, just because I believe the “middle” is dying doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity. There is. There’s a role being born underneath the layers that are getting compressed. The conversation is starting to form around it. There’s already a name people in the field are using.

The Marketing Engineer.

The role in one sentence: a marketer who builds with AI. Sits inside the marketing team.

The work that used to take an account team plus a strategist plus a producer is the work this person does alone, with AI agents.

It’s the role I keep wishing I had on my team. Every week.

And the thing for all of you, the marketing engineer has to be a marketer first.

Not an engineer who learned marketing on the side. Not a developer who picked up Claude. A marketer. Someone who has spent years understanding customers, briefs, campaigns, creative, brand voice, the way a CMO actually thinks about a quarter. Then learned to build.

The reason this matters: knowing what to build is harder than knowing how to build it. The “what” comes from understanding the customer, the campaign, the brand, the moment. That takes years to develop and can’t be googled. The “how” can be learned in months now, with Claude, by a motivated person.

How many stupid Linkedin posts have you seen with people saying they’ve built some awesome new Claude system that can automate all this work. A lot? I do everyday. But ok how many of those are actually by marketers? People that live and breathe it?

I see this already. Companies hiring “AI” people from engineering backgrounds and pointing them at marketing problems. The output is impressive. The output is also wrong, frequently, in ways the engineer can’t see and the marketing team can’t articulate fast enough to redirect.

The Marketing Engineer fixes that. But only if you start from the marketing side.

So here’s the part I really want you to read. Especially if you felt cornered by Monday’s piece.