Growth Engineer is the new Growth Marketer
The emergence of the Growth Engineer
Every marketer will need to become a Growth Engineer very soon. The role is becoming inherently more technical. Growth Engineers are a hybrid of growth marketer and engineer; they think less about running experiments and more about building the infrastructure that enables those experiments.
Several factors have driven this shift, but the most obvious is the proliferation of AI tools inside growth teams in 2025. I’m not just talking about ChatGPT. Tools like Lovable, Gumloop, Gamma, and Replit now allow marketers to build entire product features and landing pages through prompting alone.
This also disrupts how we think about cross-functional collaboration inside startups. Instead of relying on design, engineering, and product to launch new tests, growth teams will increasingly be expected to execute on their own. Rather than a marketer going to data science to create a Q1 performance dashboard, they’ll be expected to build it themselves. Rather than pitching a feature to product, they’ll be expected to ship it.
As cost to build drops, growth engineers need to ship fast
It’s no secret that the cost to build software is collapsing. Possibly to zero. As a result, competition will increase dramatically. Growth teams will need to become leaner, faster, and far more technical in how they approach acquisition and retention. A growth engineer’s skillset will include:
Creating AI agents for competitive intelligence and campaign optimization
Building full product features and landing pages
Creating complex dashboards to unify marketing data
Connecting data pipelines for attribution and incrementality testing
Designing high-quality performance ad creative
Launching workflows to automate content creation
The exact skills will evolve, but the theme remains the same. Ownership from end to end. Building campaigns and systems from scratch, then iterating on them continuously.
A case study from Canva
The ability to build personalization at scale is perfectly illustrated by Canva’s work in programmatic SEO. They’ve quietly created millions of templates optimized for search. Each template (resumes, social posts and presentations) targets a long-tail keyword and pulls users directly into the editor.
They engineered a distribution system where every template is a landing page and every landing page is a product entry point. This is very different from growth marketing/ content marketing as it requires technical chops to pull off.
Instead of a traditional growth flow of search → blog → CTA → signup → dashboard, Canva took the approach of search → editable design → account creation.
Pulling this off requires technical execution across template rendering, preview images, metadata, schema, and localization across languages. I expect work like this to be owned end to end by growth teams in the very near future.
Traditional growth marketers will get replaced
A traditional growth marketer could easily ideate the concept of millions of templates acting as an acquisition and retention engine. That’s where it would stop. Building the infrastructure, maintaining the systems, and running experiments on top of those templates requires engineers who think about growth.
This example still involved close collaboration with an engineering team. But as the friction of requiring engineering hours disappears, growth teams unlock the ability to experiment far more aggressively and independently.
If startups prioritize hiring technical marketers, they gain a massive advantage over teams constantly fighting for resources to ship tests. This role is still early, but hiring managers should look for marketers who instinctively ask, “how can I automate this?” and feel an itch to build things themselves. That mindset will separate the top 1 percent of growth teams from everyone else.
A company already hiring this way
My eyes lit up when I saw a recent growth role from Ramp that clearly reflects the growth engineer archetype. Take a look at some of the requirements below from the job listing:
The posting emphasizes a bias toward shipping over spec’ing. That single line captures the shift perfectly and the next era of marketing will reward people who build, not just plan.
To summarize:
Growth engineers are a new breed that blend growth marketing and engineering
As build costs fall, growth teams must ship faster for distribution advantage
Canva shows how technical growth systems can unlock massive scale
Since the role is still new, hire marketers with an itch to build infrastructure for testing
Here’s to the next decade of growth engineers.
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That’s very true - I am seeing smaller companies adopting this concept already!