The Marketing Engineer

The New Rules of Building a High-Growth Marketing Team | Brandon Camhi, Cognition

Profound — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Cognition crossed $1 billion in revenue run rate in roughly two years. Now, its new SVP of Marketing, Brandon Camhi, is taking on the challenge of scaling its marketing organization to match the company's rapid growth.

With the company growing at an incredible pace, Brandon is rethinking how a modern marketing organization should operate. He's recruiting some of the best talent in the industry, challenging traditional org structures, and putting AI to work across the entire function. One of his first moves? Launching a $10 million billboard campaign across 14 cities in just one week.

In this episode, Brandon joins Profound’s Trevor Pyle to share what he learned scaling marketing at Rippling and how he’s applying those lessons at Cognition. They get into the AI-powered workflows his team is building, why he believes brand investment should start early, how AEO fits into the bigger picture, and why he isn't worried about AI replacing CMOs.

We discuss:

The first priorities when taking over marketing at a billion-dollar company
How a $10 million global billboard campaign came together in just one week
Why Brandon is rethinking traditional marketing org charts
The unconventional recruiting approach he uses to attract top talent
What he learned from his biggest mistakes at Rippling
How Cognition uses Devin to streamline paid ads, lead management, and internal reporting
Why high-quality storytelling matters in enterprise marketing
How AEO connects to everything from customer reviews to social media
The interview exercise Brandon considers more valuable than a case study
Why he isn't worried about AI replacing CMOs

Connect with Brandon:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcamhi/

Cognition: https://cognition.com/

Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

How Much Can One Marketer Do With AI? | Matt Ratchford, Mutiny

Profound — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 06:00:00 -0400

One headline change increased Mutiny’s signups by 71 percent overnight. For Matt Ratchford, the company’s entire growth marketing team, it was another lesson in how much leverage a solo marketer can create by focusing on the right problems.

Matt has been helping rebuild Mutiny’s narrative after a pivot from website personalization to an AI sales assistant. Working as a team of one has forced him to be ruthless about prioritization and deliberate about where AI actually adds leverage, shaping everything from Mutiny’s AEO strategy and content systems to its website messaging.

Matt explains how he runs growth in six-to-eight-week bets, why he still cold outreaches to people every day to learn faster, how Mutiny is building systems around AI search and content distribution, and why the best marketers will combine deep domain expertise with the ability to use AI across a much broader range of work.

We discuss:

How Matt runs growth at Mutiny as a one-person marketing team
Why AI can accelerate you in the wrong direction if the process is broken
The six-to-eight-week bet system he uses to prioritize what to work on
The headline change that increased signups by 71 percent overnight
How Mutiny is rebuilding its narrative for the AI search era
Why Matt still cold outreaches to people every day to learn faster
Building AEO and content distribution systems around a team of one
Why deep domain expertise still matters in an AI-powered marketing team

Connect with Matt:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ratchford-940019142/
Mutiny: https://www.mutinyhq.com/

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Matt’s Substack Newsletter: https://mattratchford.substack.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

From $100K to $8M Pipeline With AI | Luke Harries, ElevenLabs

Profound — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Until this year, webinars at ElevenLabs were mostly ad hoc, run by whoever on the sales team had the bandwidth. Then one person used AI to turn the process into a real system, taking the pipeline from about $100,000 to more than $8 million by the end of H1.

That’s just one example of how ElevenLabs is using AI to rethink marketing. Luke Harries, who leads growth at the company behind some of the most realistic AI voice models in the world, shares how that thinking extends beyond webinars, from replacing a $40,000 ad localization tool with an AI system that drove $3 million in incremental revenue, to turning this internal tool into a full-fledged product other companies can now use for themselves.

Luke breaks down what’s working, how they’re measuring AI ROI, and what this shift could mean for the future of marketing.

We discuss:

Why ElevenLabs built its own internal Marketing Engineer role
The real test for whether a background agent is actually working
How one webinar system took pipeline from $100,000 to $8 million
How they replaced a $40,000 localization tool with AI
How a wave of one-star reviews turned into a $10 million ARR product
Why international expansion breaks most SDR systems, and how AI fixed it

Connect with Luke:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-harries/

ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Inside the AI Operating System of a Modern CRO | Sam Richard, ngrok

Profound — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

She used to lose an hour every morning checking dashboards and manually looking for trends. Today, Sam Richard, Chief Revenue Officer at ngrok, has replaced that routine with an AI system that does it for her.

It's one of many systems she's built to give herself more leverage. From managing her family's schedule to monitoring product and customer signals at ngrok, she's constantly looking for repetitive work she can hand off to AI.

Sam explains how she decides between local and frontier models, how LLMs are changing customer acquisition at ngrok, and why she believes the best way to start with AI is simply narrating your day and letting it find the bottlenecks.

We discuss:

How she automated her morning dashboard review
Choosing between local and frontier models
The household AI assistant she built for her family
The AEO and SEO experiments behind ngrok's website rebuild
Why ngrok referrals from LLMs are growing 40 percent month over month
Her advice for any growth leader getting started with AI

Connect with Sam:
X: https://x.com/SamCRichard
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-crowell-richard/
ngrok: https://ngrok.com

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

How Notion Uses AI Agents to Run Smarter Ad Campaigns | Aaron Lu

Profound — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0400

I agents are bringing a new level of automation to ad operations. Aaron Lu, AI Product Lead at Notion, shares how his team is using AI across growth marketing, building agents that automate workflows, monitor spend in real time, and enable capabilities that advertising platforms don't support natively.

Aaron explains how he decides what should become an AI agent versus a simple automation, how he builds feedback loops that improve agents over time, and what it takes to orchestrate multiple agents.

He also breaks down the competitor-monitoring system that won Profound's Marketing Engineering Hackathon and how building with parallel agents changed his workflow.

We discuss:

How a marketer's job shifted from doing the work to designing AI systems
Why a good cost-per-lead number can still hide wasted ad spend
The swarm of AI agents running Notion's ad operations
How he built an AI agent for LinkedIn dayparting, a feature the platform doesn't natively support
The creative duplication agent that saves a day of work every week
What he would do differently on his hackathon-winning project
How to decide what to automate first

Connect with Aaron:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-lu/
Notion: https://www.notion.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

How Anthropic’s First Growth Marketer Builds with Claude | Austin Lau

Profound — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Austin Lau was a non-technical marketer when he started experimenting with Claude to write custom Google Ads scripts, pasting in code, running it, and iterating through errors until it worked.

At the time, he had joined Anthropic as its first growth marketer. His experimentation reshaped how he thought about his own role and the future of marketing. He went from doing everything manually to building budget dashboards, daily briefings, and campaign automations, while developing a framework for what to automate and what to leave alone.

Austin explains why AI is turning marketers into builders, giving them the technical leverage to become Marketing Engineers, when to use Cowork versus Claude Code, and the “blast radius” test he runs before letting agents touch any live campaigns.

We discuss:

Why marketers are positioned to become Marketing Engineers
The shift from managing campaigns to managing a fleet of agents
The “blast radius” test he runs before automating anything
Why you don’t need 50+ AI skills
When a skill is actually worth building, and when it just adds noise
Building a live budget dashboard inside Claude Cowork
The Google Ads script that turned him from a marketer into a builder
How to know when to reach for Claude Code versus Claude Cowork

Connect with Austin:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austinlau1/

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:
Austin’s Claude Cowork Guide: https://claude.com/blog/best-practices-for-getting-started-with-claude-cowork

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Why You Should Stop Using One AI Model for Everything | Andy McCutcheon, Block

Profound — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Andy McCutcheon is the GTM AI Lead at Block, and spends much of his time convincing colleagues who have never opened a terminal that they can build their own tools.

At a company of six thousand people, that means weekly office hours, casual working sessions where he shares his screen live and lets people watch him think, and a running answer for anyone who says they don't know where to start: you have to be bad at something before you can be good at it.

Block’s internal skills marketplace now holds three thousand tools, many of them built by people who found their way in through office hours just like Andy's.

We discuss:

Getting non-technical teams comfortable building with AI
What it takes to contribute to an internal marketplace of three thousand skills and tools
Why Andy tells people they have to be bad at something before they can be good at it
What goes into building an MCP server that people can actually talk to conversationally
Two slash commands that give his AI agent memory between sessions
The personal newsletter that runs AI research every night while he sleeps

Connect with Andy:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andysmccutcheon/
Block: https://block.xyz/

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Andy's Skills Library: https://github.com/andymccutcheon/skills

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

The Collaborative AI System Every Marketing Team Will Soon Need | Lucy Hoyle, Carta

Profound — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:30:00 -0400

Most marketing teams are still working across disconnected systems, scattered context, and workflows that break down as they grow. Lucy Hoyle, Senior Content Engineer at Carta, set out to solve that problem.

At Profound's Marketing Engineering Hackathon, she built a prototype she calls the “marketing brain.” A shared context layer that transforms siloed workflows into systems that enable collaboration, while giving teams a common source of truth that continuously evolves. That prototype became the seed of a full operating system now rolling out across Carta's entire marketing team.

In this episode, Lucy explains how she built the prototype, the challenges she faced along the way, and concepts like context rot and token discipline that are shaping where marketing teams are headed over the next few years.

We discuss:

What context rot actually is and why too much information can make AI worse
BM25: The keyword-based search library Lucy used to filter the information Claude ingests
How a hackathon prototype evolved into a company-wide Marketing OS
The pitch strategy Lucy recommends to get buy-in from executives
Why “Have you asked Claude” became Carta’s unofficial rule

Connect with Lucy:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucy-hoyle-883381138/

Carta: https://carta.com

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Profound’s Agent Marketplace: https://www.tryprofound.com/agent-templates
The Profound brand kit & product messaging agent Lucy built at the Profound Marketing Engineering Hackathon: https://hub.tryprofound.com/hubfs/Lucy%20-%20Marketing%20Engineer%20Hackathon%20Files.zip
Rank-BM25, the open source Python library Lucy used to filter context for Claude: https://pypi.org/project/rank-bm25/ and https://github.com/dorianbrown/rank_bm25
Lucy’s Marketing Brain Hackathon Presentation: https://shorturl.at/AvKDU

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Building 90 AI Agents Inside a $2B ARR Marketing Team | Holly Chen, Samsara

Profound — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:49:22 -0400

Samsara is one of the most advanced examples of AI adoption inside the marketing team of a large public company. Holly Chen, VP of Growth Marketing, shares the marketing team’s approach.

A big part of their success came from a deliberate three-phase rollout that moved the marketing organization from a leadership mandate to company-wide enablement and, ultimately, sustained momentum. The whole approach runs on a bottoms-up philosophy: the people closest to the pain points are the ones building the solutions, rather than AI development being centralized within a small team.

Holly also shares how AI has changed the way her team hires, why she looks for a specific kind of AI fluency in candidates, and why she believes every marketer needs to become a Marketing Engineer.

We discuss:

The three-stage rollout: mandate, enablement, and sustained momentum
Why bottoms-up AI adoption outlasts top-down mandates
How a 230-person team built 90 AI agents (and how they keep them running)
Samsara’s AI governing body
The hackathons and monthly AI Power Hour that keep teams building
Why Holly values judgment over taste in the age of AI
The biggest hiring mistake marketers make in the AI era

Connect with Holly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/holly

Samsara: https://www.samsara.com

Connect with Profound

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned

Gong: https://www.gong.io
Playwright: https://playwright.dev
Gumloop: https://www.gumloop.com/
Holly’s Substack: https://hollychen.substack.com

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Why Figma is Winning in the Age of AI Search with Reema Batta

Profound — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:38:50 -0400

Figma is shipping products at a pace most marketing teams can barely track. Reema Batta, VP of Growth Marketing, is the person responsible for making sure they can actually keep up.

Part of how they do it: a context layer. Every product Figma launches now comes with structured positioning, messaging, and value props that channel teams can reference directly, without a meeting or Slack chain. The coordination tax, as she calls it, is something she has systematically engineered out of the workflow.

Reema also explains why Figma's AI-generated content is outperforming human-written pages, why the bottleneck in marketing is moving upstream to judgment, and how she thinks about prioritization when the product roadmap never slows down.

We discuss:

How the marketing funnel is being compressed inside AI conversations
The context layer that keeps channel teams current without another meeting
Why AI-generated content is outperforming human-written pages
Tokenmaxxing as a phase-one metric, and what comes after it
How Reema interviews for systems-thinking skills
Why strong judgment is quickly becoming a marketer’s most important attribute

Connect with Reema:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reema-batta/

Figma: https://www.figma.com

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/

X: https://x.com/tryprofound

Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer

Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:

Figma Config: https://config.figma.com
Figma: https://www.figma.com
Profound’s Zero Click Event: https://www.tryprofound.com/zeroclick
Marketing Engineer Job Board: https://www.marketingengineer.jobs/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Inside the AI Marketing OS Running Wispr Flow's Growth Team with Matt Swulinski

Profound — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:46:07 -0400

Until recently, Matt was the only person running all of Wispr Flow’s marketing execution solo.

Meta and Google Ads, newsletter sponsorships, landing pages… it was all on him, and the company was growing fast. Handling everything manually became impossible. But instead of hiring, Matt decided to build.

The result? An agent-powered marketing OS that now runs across a team of nearly 20. It handles 100 newsletter sponsorships a month, automates the admin that was eating 10–20% of everyone's week, and made several planned hires unnecessary.

We discuss:

How marketing and growth teams are evolving in real time
Why the marketers of the future will be “systems thinkers”
The reason most marketers don’t utilize AI tools to their full potential
How he scaled a personal OS into something his whole team runs on
The newsletter sponsorship system that runs itself
Matt’s session start and end workflows that keep Claude Code sessions from spiraling into chaos

***Connect with Matt***

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mswulinski/
Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

***Connect with Profound***

Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

***Resources Mentioned***

Matt’s Claude Skills Explainer document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UuQoeQSzXoc6hH055lbz0h9P6QLYciUT/view?usp=sharing
Matt’s Claude Skills Files: Session Start, Session End, and the Sponsorship Copy Waterfall (Drop them into Claude Code to try them): https://hub.tryprofound.com/hubfs/wispr-flow-claude-skills.zip
Dub.co for affiliate and tracking link management: https://dub.co/
Claude Code: what Matt used to build his marketing OS: https://claude.ai/code
Wispr Flow: Matt's company; voice-to-text tool he uses to dictate prompts across all his sessions https://wisprflow.ai/
VS Code, where Matt runs his Claude Code sessions: https://code.visualstudio.com/
Linear, the project management tool integrated into Matt's OS for task assignment: https://linear.app/
Hex: Matt's BI tool, referenced when pulling live data into reports https://hex.tech/
GitHub: used to version control and share the Wispr Flow Marketing OS across the team https://github.com/
Logitech MX Master 4 Mouse, the hardware Matt uses to navigate between sessions hands-free with Wispr Flow: https://shorturl.at/FlKsu

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Introducing: The Marketing Engineer

Profound — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:15:46 -0400

Meet the marketer who builds.

Marketing Engineers pair creativity with systems thinking, combining a marketer's instincts with technical ability to bring ideas to life. They're architects, agentic operators, and craftspeople with high taste.

In the episodes ahead, you'll hear directly from practitioners and leaders who've reorganized how their teams operate, built marketing workflows for scale and quality, and invented capabilities that didn't exist before.

This is The Marketing Engineer, from Profound. New episodes every two weeks.

Connect with Profound:

Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://www.tryprofound.com/