2,957 profiles · 889 open roles · snapshot of 12 September 2026
889 open roles for GTM engineers. Five of them are leadership.
Four years ago almost nobody used the title. Today 2,957 people hold it, and two thirds of them adopted it inside the last twelve months.
Companies are opening these roles far faster than they are deciding who should run the function. We counted the market profile by profile and posting by posting rather than estimating it.
People holding the GTM engineer title worldwide.
Adopted the title in the last twelve months, 2,023 people in all.
Open roles worldwide, de-duplicated from 1,635 live postings.
Of those 889 are head-of, director or VP roles.
1 · The curve
A title that went vertical in 2025
People starting a GTM engineering role, counted by the quarter they started. Each bar is first days rather than headcount, so the chart shows how fast the title is being adopted.
Read the last bar with care. Profile updates arrive over roughly two months, so the current quarter always looks like a collapse and never is. Every growth statement on this page uses complete half-years and leaves Q3 2026 out.
Q2 2026 produced more GTM engineers on its own than the entire market did in the four years before 2025, which came to 378 people.
New starts in the first half of 2026 against the first half of 2025: 1,269 against 346 . In the first half of 2024 the figure was 86.
2 · The origins
Nobody grows up as a GTM engineer
The most recent role each person held before the GTM one, classified by title keywords. Shares are of the 2,831 people who carry a previous role.
651 of the 2,831 did not fall cleanly into a family and 74 came straight from a student or internship role. Neither group is charted, which is why the bars above sum to 2,106 rather than 2,831.
3 · The ceiling
A function with no management layer
Open roles by the seniority named in the posting title, with median advertised pay across the US postings that publish a band.
| Level | Open roles | Share | US median pay | Priced roles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Individual contributor | 659 | 74.1% | $150K | 239 |
| Senior / founding | 120 | 13.5% | $155K | 54 |
| Lead / principal | 79 | 8.9% | $211K | 29 |
| Junior / associate | 18 | 2.0% | — | 1 |
| Intern | 8 | 0.9% | — | 0 |
| Head / director / VP | 5 | 0.6% | — | 1 |
Only 324 of the 889 postings publish a salary band, so every pay figure rests on roughly a third of the market. The two levels showing no median have too few priced postings to carry one.
Three quarters of the market is a plain IC
659 of 889 open roles carry no seniority marker at all. Companies are buying the work well before they have decided the function needs a leader.
The pay ceiling arrives early
A lead or principal posting pays a median of $211K against $150K for an IC, a 41% step. That step is the whole career ladder, because the rung above it barely exists.
4 · The map
An American job, and a startup one
Where the 889 open roles sit, and how big the companies posting them are. Country shares are of all 889. Size shares are of the 475 roles whose employer size is known.
Open roles by country
Hiring company size
The twelve countries listed account for 723 of the 889 roles. The remaining 166 are spread across markets with fewer than seven roles each.
of open GTM engineering roles are American. The title has travelled, though: the UK, India and Germany add another 18% between them.
roles sit at a company with more than 10,000 employees. 66% of the roles with a known employer size are at companies under 200 people.
How we did this
- Source
- Public professional-profile and job-posting data, snapshot of 12 September 2026. Nobody in this sample was contacted or interviewed.
- Population
- Every profile whose current role title contains “GTM engineer” or “go-to-market engineer” in a LinkedIn-derived profile corpus. That is 2,957 people, 2,954 of whom carry a usable start date.
- Open roles
- 1,635 live postings matching the same titles, de-duplicated to 889 by employer, title and country. Boards cross-list the same role 1.8 times on average, so the raw 1,635 is not a figure anybody should quote, including us.
- Previous role
- The most recent experience entry starting before the GTM role began, classified by title keywords. Keyword classification is coarse by nature: a “growth lead” who wrote SQL all day reads as marketing here.
- Reporting lag
- Profile updates land over roughly two months, so the newest quarter is always undercounted. Q3 2026 is drawn on the chart and excluded from every trend statement.
- Two date bases
- The half-year comparisons and the quarterly series are tabulated slightly differently, so adding the two 2026 bars gives 1,284 where the half-year figure above says 1,269 . The gap is fifteen people and moves nothing on this page, but it is there and you should know before you quote either one.
- Survivorship
- This counts people who hold the title now. Anyone who took it and has since moved on is invisible here, so the early quarters are understated and the real curve is steeper than the one on this page.
- Known limits
- The posting corpus keeps only a rolling two-month window, so there is no posting history sitting behind this snapshot and no month-over-month movement yet. Pay medians rest on the 324 postings that publish a band, which skew American. Employer size is known for 475 of the 889 roles.
The counts behind every chart on this page are available as a CSV, under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Reuse it freely, with a link back to this page.
How to cite this
Trayo Research. “889 open roles for GTM engineers. Five of them are leadership.” September 2026. https://www.trayo.ai/research/state-of-the-gtm-engineer
Charts and figures may be reproduced or redrawn with attribution. If you would like a cut of the data we have not published, such as open roles for a single country broken out by employer, email [email protected] .
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