Function
How Clay built the GTM Engineering function
How Clay named the role — and ran it like a product team.
Read the sourceClay — How We Built Clay's GTM Engineering FunctionClay ↗The GTM Engineer title did not come from a job-architecture offsite. In 2023 Yash Tekriwal was running inbound, scoring, CRM hygiene, playbooks, and live sales calls at once. Clay’s co-founder named the hybrid: not quite AE, not quite RevOps — GTM Engineer.
Clay later ran the function like a product team: sprints, versioned workflows, release notes, reporting next to the founders. Success is meetings booked and hours saved, not tickets closed. RevOps keeps the existing motion running; GTM engineering changes what the motion is.
For teams hiring their first GTMe, the Clay lesson is start inside RevOps (they own the data), give the hire a bottleneck not a backlog, and protect iteration. The role only exists because AI collapsed work that used to need three people.
The loop
- Embed the first GTMe where the data already lives (usually RevOps).
- Give them one revenue bottleneck, not a Salesforce ticket queue.
- Ship like product: spec, prototype on a small batch, then scale.
- Report outcomes (meetings, hours saved) to the same altitude as sales leadership.
- Promote internal plays that work into shared infrastructure — not one-off hero tables.
Featured from a public write-up. Read the original at Clay — How We Built Clay's GTM Engineering Function. Author: Yash Tekriwal · LinkedIn · Site.