Clay CEO Kareem Amin to Talk GTM Engineers at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
Clay co-founder Kareem Amin will take the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to explain why go-to-market engineering has become a distinct job title inside software companies.
Kareem Amin, co-founder and chief executive of the sales automation startup Clay, is set to appear on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, where he will discuss the emergence of the go-to-market engineer. The session puts a name to a role that has spread quickly through B2B software companies over the past two years: a technical operator who builds data pipelines, enrichment workflows and automated outreach instead of carrying a traditional quota.
Clay has been one of the main commercial drivers behind that shift. The New York-based company sells a platform that lets growth and sales teams pull signals from dozens of data sources, then trigger personalized campaigns without writing production code. Its customer list includes OpenAI, Anthropic and Canva, according to the company, and its valuation climbed past $3 billion in 2025 after a funding round led by Meritech Capital.
The GTM engineer title sits at the intersection of sales operations, growth marketing and software engineering, and companies have struggled to hire for it because no standard training path exists. Amin has argued publicly that the work is closer to product engineering than to traditional sales development, with practitioners maintaining internal tools, monitoring data quality and iterating on sequences the way a product team ships features. That framing matters because it changes who gets hired and how teams are budgeted.
Disrupt 2026 attendees who register can bring a second person at half price, an offer TechCrunch has attached to early ticket sales for the event. The AI Stage lineup this year leans heavily on operators rather than researchers, reflecting how much of the current enterprise AI conversation has moved from model capability to deployment inside revenue organizations.
What remains unsettled is whether GTM engineering survives as a standalone discipline or gets absorbed into existing roles. Vendors have an obvious interest in promoting a job category that buys their software, and some sales leaders remain skeptical that dedicated automation builders outperform generalist revenue operations teams. Amin's session should offer the clearest public case yet for the specialized version.