Making $$$ as a Marketing Engineer

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
I think one of the most valuable people in tech over the next 18 to 24 months is gonna be something called a marketing engineer. Now, some people call it a forward deployed marketer, and some other people are calling it an AI growth operator. I'm saying, call it whatever you want. The name is probably gonna change, but the job won't. It's the person who can do a whole marketing teamwork with AI agents. And I think there's gonna be a ton of money to be made in it. I actually think this becomes a 250k, 500k, a million dollar job, because every company wants more leads, they want faster experiments, they want sharper positioning, and they want to read on their customers, and they want their marketing to get smarter every week with a smaller team than a bigger team. Whoever can walk in and just build that with AI agents are gonna get to name their price. So if you're a marketer, this is how you become way more valuable. If you're a founder, you know this. You don't just want to vibe code something, you want people using your product. So you're gonna have a huge edge if you can use AI agents to do your marketing for you. By the end of this episode, you're gonna know what a marketing engineer actually does. What do they build? What the tool stack looks like? How to use things like GrockBot and Claude and Codex and Hermes and Creative Models, how they all play together within the context of a marketing engineer and the exact 30-day plan I'd follow to learn from scratch if marketing engineering is interesting to you. Let's get into the episode. I can't wait to see what you build.
So, something I can't stop thinking about is marketing keeps changing. And having been a part of multiple cycles, I've started and sold three venture-backed companies. You know, one was in the web era, one was in the social era, one was in the mobile era. Every time the technology changes, the most valuable kind of marketer changes with it. So, think about the traditional era of marketing. I actually think about it as like the Don Draper era, where marketing was about making people care through the story, through the psychology, getting your product in front of people on whatever channels existed at the time, things like traditional print media and radio. The best marketers at that time understood what people wanted, what they were insecure about, who they were trying to become, and how to package a product so the market paid attention. Obviously, that skill matters a lot. But then the internet showed up and it created the digital marketer. So it evolved from traditional to digital. Suddenly you had websites, email, SEO, Google. In 2005, I think, six, you had Facebook ads, landing pages, pixels. The best marketer became the person who could acquire customers through channels you could actually measure. And a lot of people didn't know these were new channels. So the best marketers understood funnels, targeting these new channels, analytics, things like Google Analytics, and the very practical question about what happens after someone clicks.
Then software created loops and then growth hacking became a thing around, if I remember correctly, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 The best growth hacker people were all about activation, referrals, onboarding, retention, pricing. There was a guy by the name of Dave McClure, had this, I think it was called the R Framework, activation and referral.
That was the marquee era, the symbol of the time of the growth hacker era. Basically, marketing moved closer to product because the product itself could become the growth engine. Now we're walking into the marketing engineering era. I feel like not a lot of people have spoken about this. That's why I want this to be the de facto episode about this whole era. The marketing engineer still needs all that old stuff. It still needs customer understanding, judgment, positioning, understanding distribution, taste. If anything, taste, people talk about this all the time, taste matters more now than ever because AI is about to make average marketing just unbelievably cheap. The new part is that the marketing engineer also builds the system behind the marketing. So the marketing engineer is connecting customer data, reading the results, shipping little landing pages and calculators, and then turning raw customer signal into content outbound, positioning and product ideas. So the way I think about it is traditional marketing was about making people care. Digital marketing was acquiring customers through measurable new channels. Growth hacking was about using product and data to build these loops. And marketing engineering is about using AI agents, data, code, and taste to build a marketing system that keeps learning. And the last phrase is an important one because a marketing system that keeps learning is now actually possible in the agentic era. Now, most companies already have pieces of this lying around to their credit. So they've got tools and dashboards, calls, content calendars, CRM, some SaaS tools.