Clay CEO Kareem Amin to address GTM engineering at Disrupt 2026
Clay co-founder and CEO Kareem Amin will appear on the AI Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to discuss the rise of the GTM engineer, a role Clay says it coined in 2023. The session, titled “The GTM Engineer: How AI Created Tech’s Next Big Job Category,” will examine how artificial intelligence, data and automation are reshaping go-to-market work.
Clay says roughly 100 GTM engineering job listings are appearing each month, including openings at Cursor, Lovable and Webflow. Amin’s presentation is scheduled as part of Disrupt, running October 13–15 at Moscone West in San Francisco.
A role built around repeatable revenue systems
Traditional go-to-market operations can require substantial manual work: researching target accounts, cleaning data, qualifying leads, preparing outreach and transferring information among separate systems. Clay defines GTM engineers as practitioners who build automated revenue workflows instead of completing each task individually.
The model brings together AI, data and automation to make more of those activities repeatable. It also changes the question for founders and go-to-market leaders: whether to add people to run an established process or develop systems that enable the existing team to work differently.
The wider AI Stage programme includes AI Stage sessions at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 alongside sessions focused on agents, models and sales approaches, placing Amin’s discussion within a broader examination of AI’s impact on company operations. For organisations reviewing sales, marketing and growth processes, the GTM engineer category is relevant because it focuses on the systems behind prospecting, enrichment and outreach.
Clay’s evolution from spreadsheet to GTM infrastructure
Founded in Brooklyn in 2017, Clay initially aimed to give more people access to programming capabilities through a spreadsheet that connected information and automated work without code. Salespeople, growth teams and agencies began applying the product to finding and reaching customers, prompting the company to move further into go-to-market technology.
Clay now describes its platform as infrastructure for GTM teams to access data, run agentic workflows and launch campaigns. Its OpenAI-powered agent, Claygent, automates research and outreach for sales, marketing and recruiting teams. The company reported that annual recurring revenue tripled to $100 million in a year, and it announced a $115 million Series D in September at a $7.1 billion valuation.
Clay has also announced a $1 million scholarship fund to train GTM engineers. Amin, who previously served as VP of product at The Wall Street Journal and co-founded Frame, will use the Disrupt session to explain how AI-native GTM works in practice.
What companies should evaluate
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 is expected to bring together more than 10,000 founders, investors, operators and technology leaders, with more than 200 sessions, 250-plus speakers and 300-plus exhibiting startups. Amin’s session addresses a longstanding business issue—finding and reaching suitable customers without continually adding people and tools.
For businesses assessing AI in revenue operations, the practical implication is to identify manual research, data and outreach steps that can be converted into governed, repeatable workflows, then decide which capabilities require a specialist responsible for building and maintaining those systems.