Platforms run the auction and agents do the work. A PME owns what it all depends on: the creative going in, the decisions that steer it and the signal that proves what it returned.
Built on the work of the teams defining the field
Performance Marketing Engineer
/pəˈfɔː.məns ˈmɑː.kɪ.tɪŋ ˌen.dʒɪˈnɪə/nounabbr. PME
Someone who designs, connects and improves the systems around automated ad platforms: the creative they receive, the decisions that guide them and the signals they optimise against. Judged on business outcomes, read alongside platform data.
informalCreative, decisions and signal, engineered as one system.
The material the platform works with: assets, concepts, variations and the testing system behind them. Targeting moved into the ads, so the creative now picks the audience.
How the advertising is directed: budgets, limits, rules, experiments and the automation that applies them, judged on outcomes the business owns.
What tells you it is working: tracking, measurement and business data, connected back to the platforms so they optimise toward conversions that are real.
The three crafts are what a PME does. The four layers are where that work lives.
What the business already knows.
Brand, past tests, margins and limits in one place, so every agent works from the same context.
Decisions, carried out.
Agents watch every account, propose with evidence, act inside written limits and log each change.
Where the next budget goes.
Budget rules, holdouts and the weekly ledger, judged on margin rather than on what a platform reports.
Numbers you can trust.
Conversions and revenue sent back server-side, deduplicated and within consent. Every other layer reads from here.
“The marketing engineer is the NEW forward deployed engineer.”
Today we introduce a new role to the marketing org: The Marketing Engineer.
We believe every business on the planet will eventually need one. Their job is to build the Agents, automations, and systems that create a new kind of marketing -- part-builder, part-strategist.
The "marketing engineer" is the NEW forward deployed engineer, and I think the BEST ones will make $1M a year!
A forward deployed engineer embeds with your team and uses AI to build the workflows
The marketing engineer does that BUT for growth, they build AI agents that find…
A Marketing Engineer doesn’t do the marketing. They build the machine that does.
Nick LaffertyFounding Marketing Engineer at ProfoundFour short courses, each ending in a project you can show.
Free material from the teams behind the role and the platforms it runs on. Open to everyone.
Copy-ready prompts for the agents in your loop. Each one asks for evidence first and leaves the decision with you.
Open the library →Contribute a prompt →
Clay
Meta