Clay CEO to Detail the Rise of GTM Engineers at Disrupt

At the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 conference, scheduled for October 13 to 15 at Moscone West in San Francisco, Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin will present a session titled "The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category." The session highlights a rapidly growing discipline that uses artificial intelligence and automation to construct revenue systems. Clay first coined the term in 2023 to describe professionals who build automated workflows rather than executing manual sales and marketing tasks.

This shift comes amid massive growth for Clay, which started in Brooklyn in 2017. The company recently tripled its annual recurring revenue to $100 million and completed an employee tender offer at a $5 billion valuation. In September, Clay secured a $115 million Series D funding round, pushing its valuation to $7.1 billion. To support this emerging career path, the company also launched a $1 million scholarship fund in September dedicated to training new GTM engineers.

Clay's platform provides the infrastructure for go-to-market teams to run agentic workflows and launch campaigns. Central to this is Claygent, an OpenAI-powered agent designed to automate research and outreach for sales, marketing, and recruiting. The market is quickly adopting this approach, with roughly 100 GTM engineering job listings now appearing monthly at companies like Cursor, Lovable, and Webflow.

For industry practitioners, the rise of the GTM engineer represents a fundamental shift in how organizations scale. Instead of hiring more personnel to manually research accounts, clean data, and qualify leads, companies can now deploy AI-native systems to handle these workflows. This allows existing teams to focus on strategy and relationship-building rather than repetitive administrative tasks, fundamentally altering the traditional sales and marketing stack.