Executive search for a Head of GTM Engineering
A Head of GTM Engineering decides how your company uses engineering to grow revenue and builds the team to do it. They choose the work worth taking on, hire the engineers, and agree with your other department heads on who owns what. The challenge is finding someone who has built these systems and can make those decisions.
Should we hire a Head of GTM Engineering or a GTM engineer first?
You may already have a GTM engineer whose work is paying off. Now you want to build a team around that work, and someone needs to lead it. Your existing engineer might be ready to step up. If they need more experience before managing a team, hiring a leader gives them someone to learn from as the team grows.
You can also hire the leader before any GTM engineers are in place. That makes sense when you have decided to invest in GTM engineering and want someone to work out how to build the team. You should be able to explain what you expect engineering to change about how you sell, even if you need the new hire to work out the details.
If you are still testing whether GTM engineering can help, start with an individual contributor. Their work gives you evidence to decide whether a larger team is worth funding. The when-to-hire guide can help you scope that first role.
What should a Head of GTM Engineering own?
The leader sets the team's roadmap and is responsible for what the work contributes to revenue. They decide where custom software is worth the effort and where buying a tool makes more sense. They also decide when to stop maintaining something that no longer justifies the work.
They may still build, especially while the team is small. As they hire engineers, more of their time goes into choosing priorities and working with sales, marketing, and RevOps leadership. Those teams need to agree on what GTM engineering will deliver and what they will continue to own themselves.
Make that responsibility explicit in the job description. Director and Manager titles also appear on senior individual contributor roles in this market. If you expect someone to hire and lead a team, say so, and explain which decisions they will have the authority to make.
How does the role fit alongside RevOps?
Companies are still working this out. In the more technical companies we track, GTM engineering tends to require a software engineering background. RevOps owns the CRM and the processes around it, while GTM engineers build agents and automation to do work that reps would otherwise do manually. Elsewhere, the roles overlap more.
It helps to define the job through the work you want done. Improving an existing sales process may belong with your RevOps leader. Building a new way to reach or serve customers through software may warrant a GTM engineering team. Your candidate should be able to discuss that distinction using your systems and the people already responsible for them. Our GTM engineering and RevOps comparison covers the overlap in more detail.
Where should you look for candidates?
Expect to consider people with different backgrounds. Some are software engineers who moved into revenue work. Others came through RevOps or sales systems and learned to build software along the way. Senior GTM engineers may be ready to lead their first team. The function is young enough that requiring a previous Head of GTM Engineering title would exclude people worth meeting.
According to GTM Engineer Search's tracking of 4,199 postings, employers use titles including Head of GTM Engineering, Director of GTM Engineering and Systems Architecture, and Senior Manager of GTM Systems. That total covers all postings analyzed, including roles outside GTM engineering; it is not a count of leadership openings.
A relevant background gets someone into the conversation. You still need to establish whether they can build software and make sound decisions about how your company goes to market. The assessment needs to cover both.
How we assess a Head of GTM Engineering
We start with systems the candidate has built. Even when most of the implementation will fall to their team, the leader needs enough experience to judge the technical decisions their engineers make. We ask what they built themselves and why they chose that approach.
Then we work through what they would do at your company. Given your current systems and sales process, where would they start? What would they leave alone? Their priorities should follow from what they understand about your business and the effort involved in making the changes.
We spend particular time on how they would work with your existing teams. Engineering and RevOps may already own parts of what you want the new hire to build. We ask the candidate to explain where responsibility should sit and how they would agree that with the people involved. A useful answer gets into the systems those teams share and the technical decisions they would need to make together.
What does executive search for a Head of GTM Engineering involve?
Every search is led personally by Joe Rhew. We work with you to define the role and assess candidates against the work you need them to lead. For finalists, we design the assessment with your team, join the debriefs, and support the offer through to close. A leadership search takes a little longer than an individual contributor search.
We use the same fee structure for leadership and individual contributor searches. See our pricing and search terms for the current fees and replacement policy.
Frequently asked questions
What does executive search for a Head of GTM Engineering involve?
We help you define what the leader will own, find candidates, and assess their technical experience and plans for your team. Joe Rhew leads the search personally, including finalist assessment and support through the offer.
Should we hire a Head of GTM Engineering or a GTM engineer first?
Hire a leader when you are ready to fund a team and need someone to take responsibility for it. That can be before your first GTM engineer joins, or after an existing engineer's work has shown you what is possible. If you are still testing whether the work justifies the investment, start with an individual contributor.
Does a Head of GTM Engineering need to be technical?
Yes. They need experience building systems so they can judge their team's technical decisions and understand what a proposed project will take. Their assessment should also cover how they choose priorities and work with the other teams at your company.
How is a Head of GTM Engineering different from a RevOps leader?
RevOps typically owns the CRM and the processes around it. GTM engineering builds software and automation that can take on manual revenue work or support new ways of selling. The responsibilities overlap, so you need to agree on what each team owns before hiring.