We collected the profiles of about 750 people with the title GTM Engineer. A few weeks later we checked every one of them again, live.
160 had already changed title. That's 21%, in weeks.
Where they went
Not up, and not into engineering. The largest group moved sideways into other GTM roles — strategy, enablement, growth. The next largest went to RevOps or sales and marketing ops. Some went into sales. A handful became founders.
Eight, out of 160, moved into software engineering.
The GTM Engineer title, for most people, is a stop on a go-to-market career. It is not the beginning of an engineering one. People take it, use it, and move on to the GTM job they were heading for anyway.
Why it matters if you hire one
Every time a GTM Engineer leaves, the systems they built stay behind — undocumented, because documentation was never the fun part, and understood by exactly one person who no longer works for you.
The routing rules keep running. Nobody knows why a lead went to the wrong rep. The enrichment waterfall keeps spending. Nobody knows which source is doing the work. Six months later a new hire rebuilds it all from scratch, because reverse-engineering the old version would take longer.
Twenty-one percent churn in weeks means this isn't a risk. It's the expected case.
What to do about it
You can try to hire for tenure. Good luck: the title is under two years old and the people in it are still working out what they want.
Or you can stop depending on one person's memory. Insist on documentation and runbooks as part of the job, not an afterthought. Keep the architecture in a place the next person can read. Build the stack as a system with owners, not as one clever individual's collection of automations.
That's how we deliver it: a named engineer you interview and approve, backed by an architect and a bench who already know your stack. When the engineer changes, the work doesn't stop and the knowledge doesn't leave. You hire the capability, not the individual.
Last in the series: India, the US and Canada have three different ideas of what a GTM Engineer is.