The Rise of the GTM Engineer.

Hi there, My name is Premdeep. I’m currently an intern at Novlini, and like every other student in a Business school right now, I’ve been trying to figure out where I fit in.

For a long time, I thought I had to choose: be a coder or be a business person. But over the last few months working here, I realized that the most exciting career path isn't in either of those boxes. It’s right in the middle.

If you’ve been paying attention to the job market in B2B tech lately, you might have noticed something weird.

While traditional roles like "Sales Development Representative" (SDR) and "Marketing Manager" are getting harder to land, a new, strange title is quietly popping up at the fastest-growing companies in the world (think Clay, Linear, or Ramp).

It’s called the GTM (Go-To-Market) Engineer.

And honestly? It might just be the single most leveraged, high-value role in the modern startup stack.

If you are a student, a recent grad, or just someone trying to figure out where the puck is going in tech, you need to pay attention to this.

So, what actually is a GTM Engineer?

For a long time, the tech world was divided into two distinct tribes:

1. The Builders: Software Engineers, Product Managers. They build the thing.

2. The Sellers: Sales Reps, Marketers, RevOps. They sell the thing.

But AI and low-code tools have blurred that line.

Think of a GTM Engineer as a "hacker" for the sales team. They aren’t building the core product. They are building the systems that help sell the product automatically. They live at the intersection of code, data, and revenue.

Here is the difference:

• Traditional Sales: Hires 10 SDRs to manually research leads on LinkedIn and copy-paste emails all day.

• GTM Engineering: Hires one engineer to write a script that scrapes thousands of leads, enriches them with AI agents to find their exact pain points, and triggers highly personalized emails while the team sleeps.

They answer questions like:

• “How can we connect our CRM to our product usage data so we know exactly when a user is ready to buy?”

• “Can we build an AI agent that automatically reads a prospect's annual report and drafts a pitch based on their CEO's goals?”

• “How do we scrape this directory, clean the data, and pipe it into Salesforce without a human touching it?”

Why this role is exploding right now

We are entering the era of the "lean" startup. The days of "growth at all costs" where companies would just hire armies of salespeople to throw at a problem are over.

Companies want efficiency. They want leverage. They want automation.

This has created a massive vacuum for people who understand both APIs and ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

If you can write a little bit of Python (or even just master no-code tools like n8n, Make, or Clay) AND you understand how a sales funnel works, you suddenly become a unicorn.

You are doing the work of five people, but better, faster, and cheaper. That makes you recession-proof.

The Toolkit: It’s not just about coding

You don’t need to be a full-stack developer to do this. In fact, the barrier to entry is lower than you think. The "GTM Stack" usually looks like this:

• The Brain: Attio or Folk (Flexible, API-first CRMs).

• The Hands: Clay or Apollo (For scraping and data enrichment).

• The Plumbing: Make.com or n8n (To connect everything together).

• The Intelligence: OpenAI or Claude (To analyze data and write copy).

If you can connect these dots, you are a GTM Engineer.

Learning the ropes at Novlini

This brings me to my own journey.

I’ve been interning at Novlini, and honestly, it has been a crash course in exactly this kind of thinking. Novlini isn’t just a typical consulting firm; it’s basically a playground for aspiring GTM Engineers.

Here, we don’t just "do marketing." We engineer it.

During my time here, I haven’t just been pushing paper. I’ve been getting my hands dirty with the actual tools of the trade. I’ve learned how to look at a manual process something tedious and boring that eats up hours of time and ask the million-dollar question: "How can I code this away?"

A few things I picked up that I’m taking with me:

• Systems Thinking: Learning that a CRM isn’t just a database; it’s a living engine that needs to be architected, not just filled with data.

• Automation Logic: How to use tools like Attio’s workflows to make things happen automatically (like moving a deal stage based on an email reply).

• Data Scarcity vs. Abundance: Understanding that data is everywhere, but clean, actionable data is rare and knowing how to get it is a superpower.

Novlini gave me the sandbox to build real, tangible skills that I can actually put on a resume. I'm not just saying "I know Sales." I'm saying "I can build the machine that runs Sales."

The Bottom Line

If you are looking for your next career pivot, stop looking at the traditional roles everyone else is fighting for.

Look at the gaps between the teams.

The GTM Engineer role is still undefined enough that you can define it for yourself, but valuable enough that companies are desperate to hire for it. It is the perfect role for someone who loves to build things but also cares deeply about the business side of how a company grows.

My time at Novlini has taught me that the future belongs to the technical generalist the person who can build the tool and sell it.

And trust me, that is a very fun place to be.

Join us - here.