Meet the marketing engineer: The new role shaping AI-powered marketing

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On Sept. 30 at Morning Brew Inc.’s 2026 Marketing Brew Summit, marketing leaders gathered to tackle one question: How do you stay real with your audience while the tech stack scales? Session by session, they looked at everything from brand strategy and storytelling to measurement and the AI tools we’re already using.

In one of many impactful conversations, Profound Founding Marketing Engineer Nick Lafferty sat down with Morning Brew Inc. VP of Audience & Ad Operations Kristine Wyatt to chat about the role that’s emerging: the marketing engineer.

We’re here to give you a breakdown of their session, The Marketing Engineer: Part Builder, Part Artist.

Here are some of the main takeaways from their conversation.

Who is a marketing engineer?

AI is changing the marketing landscape overnight. According to Lafferty, this is where Profound comes in. He describes Profound as “making the AI harness for marketers.” While Profound may have started as an analytics company, they’ve now expanded beyond that to help marketers “take action and give you recommendations to say…what do you do, what actions can you, the marketer, take to go improve your visibility in AI search, improve your citations, get more earned media mentions.”

That’s how Lafferty became the founding marketing engineer. While helping to build the marketing function at Profound, Lafferty saw where the role of marketing was going—to manage agents that are doing the work on your behalf. Lafferty emphasizes that this is the whole point of AI: to save time in order to do more fun stuff, like creativity and strategy.

Enter the marketing engineer, a person who Lafferty describes as someone who really likes building, tinkering around, and using AI and tools. A marketing engineer “really just depends on who has the most interest and who is the most AI-pilled marketer at your company,” by Lafferty’s definition.

Where do I get a marketing engineer?

If a marketing engineer sounds like a pretty sweet addition to your organization, you’re probably wondering the exact same thing Wyatt posits to Lafferty—where do I get one of those?

Lafferty’s answer? Well, as he said, it depends, because “this role is unique and different at every type of company. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that maybe the role and responsibilities of what this is are similar at different companies, but where the person comes from, the archetype, the background can be different.”

But he didn’t stop there. He recommended that companies look internally first and even challenged the audience on whether they could be a marketing engineer, saying, “I think half of it is just you raising your hand and saying, ‘I want to do this. Can we try this out for three months and then see how it goes?’”

Wyatt closed their conversation by asking Lafferty how he would answer this question for marketers: “What is the first thing that they can build tomorrow that will make their lives better?” Lafferty’s answer was simple: “Whatever the most annoying part of your job is, is where I would start.…Find the most annoying or repetitive part of your job, and then find a way to use AI to automate it.”

Looking for a marketing engineer—or wondering how you can become one? Profound can help. Their AI-marketing platform drives marketing in the AI era to help you win AI search. Your next customer might be using AI to find a new product or brand. Profound can help you reach them.