TechCrunch Disrupt 2026: Clay’s Kareem Amin on the rise of the GTM engineer

Two years ago, most companies didn’t have a GTM engineer. Now the role is showing up across tech, with practitioners using AI and automation to build revenue systems that once required multiple people, tools, and manual processes.

What changed — and what does it mean for the way companies find customers and grow?

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin will take the AI Stage for “The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category.” He’ll trace how AI has changed the traditional go-to-market stack and helped create a new discipline in its place, giving attendees a look at what AI-native GTM looks like in practice and how it’s changing company growth.

AI is giving go-to-market teams new ways to research prospects, work with data, personalize outreach, and automate workflows that once moved between separate tools and teams. As those capabilities converge, companies are rethinking not only their GTM technology, but who builds and manages the systems behind growth.

If you’re building a company or rethinking how your team approaches sales, marketing, and growth, this is a new role worth understanding. Secure your Disrupt pass and see where GTM engineering fits into the next generation of go-to-market. Get a second pass at a 50% discount, and more savings for groups of four or more.

Traditional go-to-market work can involve hours of researching accounts, cleaning data, qualifying leads, preparing outreach, and moving information between systems. GTM engineering uses AI, data, and automation to turn more of that work into repeatable systems.

Clay coined the role in 2023. Its own GTM engineering guide describes GTM engineers as practitioners who build automated revenue workflows rather than executing individual GTM tasks by hand. The company says roughly 100 GTM engineering job listings are now appearing each month, including roles at companies such as Cursor, Lovable, and Webflow.

For founders and GTM leaders deciding where to put their next dollar or whether to make their next hire, this session offers another way to think about growth. Do you add more people to execute the existing process, or build systems that let the people you already have execute differently?

At Disrupt, Amin will put the shift into context and explore what AI-native GTM looks like in practice. Get your ticket to Disrupt to understand a role that barely existed a few years ago but could change how your next sales, marketing, or growth team operates.

Clay started in Brooklyn in 2017 with a goal: give more people access to the power of programming. Its original spreadsheet let users connect information and automate work without writing code. When salespeople, growth teams, and agencies began using it to find and reach customers, Clay followed them into go-to-market.

Today, the company provides infrastructure for GTM teams to access data, run agentic workflows and launch campaigns. Its OpenAI-powered agent, Claygent, automates research and outreach for sales, marketing and recruiting teams.

That evolution has been accompanied by rapid growth. TechCrunch reported in February that the company had tripled annual recurring revenue to $100 million in a year and announced an employee tender offer at a $5 billion valuation. Clay has continued growing since then, announcing a $115 million Series D in September at a $7.1 billion valuation.

Clay is also investing directly in the job category at the center of Amin’s Disrupt session, announcing a $1 million scholarship fund in September to train GTM engineers.

For companies trying to determine where AI can make a meaningful difference in revenue operations, add Amin’s session to your Disrupt agenda and see how one company is putting that model into practice.

Kareem Amin co-founded Clay in 2017 and serves as its co-founder and CEO. Before Clay, he was VP of product at The Wall Street Journal and co-founded collaboration startup Frame, which Sailthru acquired in 2012.

Amin started Clay around the idea of putting programming capabilities into more people’s hands. AI eventually gave that idea a new application: enabling GTM teams to build systems that automate research, data enrichment, and outreach without relying on traditional engineering resources for every workflow.

Want to understand what a GTM engineer could mean for your own growth strategy? Secure your Disrupt pass and hear directly from one of the founders helping define the category.

“The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category” is one of 200+ sessions across six industry stages, roundtables, and breakouts at Disrupt, October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco. More than 10,000 founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders are expected, along with 250+ speakers and 300+ exhibiting startups.

Beyond the sessions, matchmaking, dealmaking, and networking give attendees opportunities to meet potential customers, investors, partners, and other founders confronting many of the same growth challenges.

GTM engineering may be a new job category, but the problem it addresses isn’t: how do you find and reach the right customers without simply adding more people and more tools? At Disrupt, you can see how AI is changing that equation — and meet the people building what comes next.

Secure your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 and add “The GTM Engineer” to your agenda. Bring a colleague, partner, or peer with a 50% discount, or enjoy additional discounts with groups of four or more.