TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Clay’s Kareem Amin on the rise of the GTM engineer
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Clay’s Kareem Amin is talking about the new GTM engineer role at Disrupt 2026. AI is turning sales and marketing work into systems one person can run.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, TechCrunch Events — read the original for the full story.
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Two years ago, most companies didn’t have a GTM engineer. Now the role is spreading fast, and Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin is taking that shift to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to explain why it happened and what comes next.
His session, “The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category,” lands on the AI Stage and zeroes in on a simple change with big consequences: AI is folding prospect research, data work, outreach, and workflow automation into one discipline. Instead of passing tasks between separate tools and teams, companies are starting to build revenue systems that behave more like software.
That idea came out of Clay’s own path. The company started in Brooklyn in 2017 with a broad goal of making programming more accessible. Its spreadsheet-style product let people connect information and automate work without code. But sales teams, growth groups, and agencies pushed Clay into go-to-market, and the company followed.
Clay now says it provides infrastructure for GTM teams to access data, run agentic workflows, and launch campaigns. Its OpenAI-powered agent, Claygent, handles research and outreach for sales, marketing, and recruiting teams. And the company is clearly betting that the category is real: it says about 100 GTM engineering job listings are appearing each month, with companies like Cursor, Lovable, and Webflow among them.
The money around Clay has piled up too. TechCrunch reported in February that annual recurring revenue had tripled to $100 million in a year, alongside an employee tender offer at a $5 billion valuation. In September, Clay announced a $115 million Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation, plus a $1 million scholarship fund to train GTM engineers. Disrupt will put Amin’s pitch in front of a crowd expected to top 10,000 people, with more than 250 speakers and 300 exhibiting startups across six industry stages.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic AI-era corporate alchemy: give an old job a fresh label, wrap it in automation, and call it the future. But GTM engineering feels less like buzz and more like the market admitting that spreadsheets, tools, and handoffs are a miserable way to run growth. The real tell is that companies are hiring for it before most people can even agree on what it means.
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