Clay was named in 61% of the 98 GTM engineer job posts we tracked between 3 May and 5 October 2026. HubSpot showed up in 55% and Salesforce in 43%. That's the stack you're competing for if you're writing one of these ads right now.
I run Bubblegum, and a big part of how we find clients is reading every GTM and ops job post our scrapers pick up. Over five months that came to 3,085 posts. Ninety-eight of them had GTM engineer in the title, counting the "founding", "growth" and "AI-native" versions, and that's the set this piece is about.
We count a tool or a task when it appears in our summary of the post or in the stack we pulled from it. Plenty of ads mention a tool in passing further down the page, so every percentage below is a floor.
Clay first, then the CRM, then everyone else
| Tool | Share of GTM engineer posts |
|---|---|
| Clay | 61% |
| HubSpot | 55% |
| Salesforce | 43% |
| n8n | 34% |
| Apollo | 27% |
| Instantly | 19% |
| Gong | 17% |
| Make | 16% |
| Zapier | 13% |
| Smartlead | 10% |
| Python | 8% |
| Claude | 8% |
The CRM split tells you who is hiring for this. More posts name HubSpot than Salesforce, which points at smaller and younger software companies where HubSpot is the default. Someone who only knows Salesforce will still get interviews. They'll just be chasing the smaller pile of seats.
The n8n figure surprised me. At 34% it's well clear of Make and Zapier, and a year ago I'd have bet the other way. My read is that teams hiring for this role want something they can self-host and wire into an LLM without paying per task, and n8n fits that.
Python is the odd one out. Only 8% of our posts name it, while Revnu's look at 211 employers found Python in 45% of the LinkedIn ads they read in May. Some of that gap is method, since they read full descriptions and we count summaries and stack lists. Some of it, I think, is that "GTM engineer" now covers two quite different jobs. One is close to a software engineer who happens to work on revenue. The other is the person who builds and runs the outbound and enrichment machine in Clay and n8n. Most of the posts we see want the second person.
The job is mostly pipeline
This is what the posts say the person will spend their time on, by share of posts that mention it:
- Building things, often from scratch: 89%
- Automation: 78%
- Pipeline: 69%
- Workflows: 65%
- Outbound: 57%
- Enrichment: 44%
- Integrations between tools: 37%
- AI agents or LLMs: 28%
- Reporting: 24%
- Lead routing: 15%
- CRM admin: 7%
- Forecasting: 3%
CRM admin and forecasting barely register. That's RevOps work, and a company that writes "GTM engineer" on the ad mostly wants someone pointed at creating pipeline rather than keeping the books on it. If what you actually need is clean Salesforce data and a forecast the board believes, you're hiring a RevOps person, and you'll get better applicants by calling it that.
The AI number is lower than the noise online would suggest. A bit over a quarter of posts mention agents or LLMs at all, and in the AI and automation engineer posts we track separately, that share is about half. If an AI-heavy build is the main job, that's probably the title you want.
What it pays
Only 23 of the 98 posts printed a salary, so treat this as directional. The median midpoint was $150,000 base, with the middle half sitting between $115,000 and $175,000. Revnu's sample landed at $159,500 across 70 disclosed ranges, which is close enough that I trust the shape of it.
That's base pay only. For professional roles, US private employers spend about another 46% on top of wages for benefits, payroll tax and leave, going by the Bureau of Labor Statistics compensation data for June 2026. So a $150K GTM engineer really costs around $219K a year. Call it $18K a month, before any recruiting fee.
Most of the 98 posts just say "GTM Engineer". Four say "Founding GTM Engineer", which in practice means you're the first one, there's no system yet, and nobody internal can check your work. Those are the hardest seats to fill well. The person has to be a strong builder and also fine being the only one who knows how anything works.
Before you post the ad
Name the CRM, and say which half of the job you mean. If it's outbound and enrichment, name Clay and your sending tool. If it's data, reporting and the forecast, call the role RevOps.
Put the salary in. Fewer than a quarter of these posts did, and the ones that didn't are competing blind against the ones that did.
And price the seat on loaded cost, not base. That gap is why we started Bubblegum: we place full-time GTM engineers from the Philippines and Latin America from $4K a month, all-in. It isn't the right call for every team. If the role needs someone on US calls all day or in an office, hire locally. For the build-and-run work these posts describe, the time zone matters a lot less than most people expect.