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Welcome back to What Matters This Week.
Last week, we talked about insights from our study of 2.4 million backlinks. This week, we’re zooming out to a more structural change happening inside marketing teams.
Profound Just Named the Role Every Marketing Team Needs. Here’s Why It Matters.
Here’s the TL;DR
- Profound introduced the “Marketing Engineer” — a hybrid role that sits inside marketing and builds the agents, automations, and systems that make every function faster. They’ve launched a free course through Profound University to train them.
- The role formalizes what’s already happening at companies where one person went deep on building with AI. These people are already the most indispensable members of their teams.
- For B2B marketing leaders, the question is whether you have someone who can build the systems that make AI your advantage, or whether you’re stuck generating content nobody asked for.
What’s Happening
Profound co-founder James Cadwallader announced this week that the company is formally defining a new marketing role: the Marketing Engineer. The announcement came with a detailed breakdown of what the role entails, who it’s for, and a free certification course through Profound University.
As Cadwallader put it on LinkedIn:
“Every marketing team on the planet will use AI to do their jobs better. But to build truly impactful systems, you need an owner and an orchestrator. That’s the Marketing Engineer.”
The role is a combination of marketing strategy and technical execution. Essentially, Marketing Engineers will build the infrastructure that lets marketers do higher-leverage work.
According to the Profound team, this job has two primary objectives:
- Accelerating what already exists by shadowing functions, identifying repetitive steps, and building systems that handle the recurring parts while keeping humans in the loop where judgment and taste matter.
- Inventing capabilities that didn’t exist before like agents that monitor competitor pricing changes and automatically update battlecards for sales or systems that scan hundreds of customer calls to identify champions and generate personalized review requests.
The Profound team believes the ideal people for this work come from growth marketing, SEO, and marketing ops backgrounds. People who start as marketers and teach themselves how to connect APIs, write prompts that run without supervision, and architect systems that handle entire workflows.
Why It Matters
- This is the next step in a progression that started with content engineering.
Over the past few years, the content engineering discipline has been building the case that marketing teams need builders, not just strategists and writers.
Content engineers proved that treating content like infrastructure, rather than a series of one-off deliverables, changes what a team can produce. The Marketing Engineer takes that same insight and applies it across the full marketing org: competitive intelligence, sales enablement, PR monitoring, review generation, paid media diagnostics.
- The gap between “using AI” and “building with AI” is becoming the gap between teams that scale and teams that don’t.
Most marketing teams are using AI in some capacity now. But there’s a significant difference between using ChatGPT to draft a blog post and building a system that monitors 200 competitive surfaces, grades severity, and pushes updated talk tracks to sales before the next call.
The first is individual productivity. The second is organizational capability.
You can see this playing out in the AirOps Content Engineer cohort sessions, where SEO leads and content managers walk through the workflows they’ve built:
- Automated topic research that ranks opportunities by engagement and search volume
- Content audit systems that evaluate an entire library against target keywords and output a prioritized production calendar
- Product description pipelines that one person uses to manage 500+ PDPs
The person who built the system became the most valuable person on the team, and the Marketing Engineer title is a recognition that this dynamic extends well beyond content.
- This role addresses the compounding workload problem that’s been building for a decade.
Every new channel and platform has added work to marketing without removing anything. Social didn’t replace search, video didn’t replace written content, and AI search isn’t replacing traditional SEO. Each layer stacks on top of the last, and headcount has never kept pace.
The Marketing Engineer is a direct response to that asymmetry. Instead of hiring more people to handle more channels, you hire someone who builds systems that handle the recurring parts across all of them.
What To Do About It
- Identify who’s already doing this work on your team. In most organizations, someone is already building the automations, connecting the tools, and creating the workflows that everyone else relies on. They probably don’t have “engineer” in their title. They might be in growth, ops, or content. Find them, name what they’re doing, and give them the mandate to go deeper.
- Don’t confuse “Marketing Engineer” with “replace the marketing team with robots.” The role works because it sits inside marketing and understands the strategy. The agents and automations it builds are only as good as the marketing judgment behind them. The worst version of this is someone who automates everything without understanding what’s worth automating. The best version is someone who knows the difference between a task that should run itself and a decision that needs a human.
- Start with the content supply chain. If you’re looking for where a Marketing Engineer creates the most immediate value, content operations is a strong starting point. The process of researching, creating, distributing, and repurposing content across channels is full of repeatable steps that are ripe for systematization. The strategic decisions (what to create, what angle to take, what voice to use) stay human. The logistics around them don’t have to be.
🎙️ Upcoming Events: SEO Week and Ross x Reddit
🗽 SEO Week — April 27–30, NYC
Ross is also speaking at SEO Week in New York this month — four days of advanced sessions, live experiments, and practical frameworks from the people actually shaping AI search strategy. No recycled decks. Last year’s edition set the standard. This one goes bigger.
Here’s the part worth sharing with your team: use code SEO-SIMMONDS for $100 off a four-day pass ($30 off single-day tickets). And for every ticket purchased with that code, iPullRank will donate $100 to Black Girls Code.
👉 Get your tickets at seoweek.org
🎙️ The State of AI Search — April 24th, 10am PST / 1pm EST
Ross is partnering with Reddit for Business to break down how LLMs decide which brands to surface, and what marketers can do about it right now. New research, new data, and new tactics on the role of UGC and community content in AI visibility. If this week’s newsletter hit a nerve, this session goes deeper.
👉 Register for the free webinar
Go Deeper on AI and the Future of Marketing Teams
→ Introducing the Marketing Engineer — Profound’s full breakdown of the role, including the two halves of the job, how it differs from marketing ops, where these people come from, and what the first certified cohort will look like. If this issue resonated, this is the primary source. [Profound]
→ The Content Supply Chain: How to Build One and Scale Content Output — Our framework for systematizing content operations from research through distribution. This is the kind of workflow a Marketing Engineer would build systems around. [Foundation Labs]
→ What is Content Engineering? A Quick Guide — AirOps’ Josh Spilker on the discipline that laid the groundwork for this conversation. Covers content models, metadata systems, refresh automation, and why teams that treat content like infrastructure outperform teams that scale volume. Essential context for understanding what the Marketing Engineer role builds on. [AirOps]
That’s it for this week.
If you have any questions or suggestions, reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn.
Have a great weekend,
Ethan Crump ethan@foundationinc.co
