Category: Engineering

I touched on this briefly in the last post: the other roles that Marketing Platform Engineering (MPE) overlaps with but isn’t. Before diving into what the role is and what it entails though, it’s worth pausing to draw the lines around what it’s not. MPE intersects with several familiar disciplines, which makes it easy to mistake it for something else entirely. Drawing these boundaries matters, because without them, it’s all too easy to dismiss this work as just a repackaged version of roles that already exist.

It’s not Growth Engineering or CRO

Growth engineering focuses on driving long-term growth metrics like acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue. They build new features, experiment setups, and product optimizations that shape user behaviour across the entire funnel, often well beyond marketing-owned surfaces. Their work is deeply metrics-driven, experimental, and product-oriented.

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) teams, on the other hand, run rapid, targeted tests on specific marketing surfaces, like landing pages, lead forms, or campaign microsites, to improve immediate conversion outcomes. Their work is quick, tactical, and often one-off.

MPE is neither of these. It doesn’t run growth experiments or tweak campaigns to boost short-term conversion rates. Instead, it builds the platforms and workflows that enable both growth and CRO teams to move faster and more effectively: robust CMS architectures, experimentation frameworks, analytics pipelines, and reusable systems. MPE is about building the foundation that these teams operate on, not the experiments themselves.

It’s not DevOps or Platform Engineering

DevOps and platform teams are focused on infrastructure reliability, deployment pipelines, CI/CD, and security across an organization. Their work is measured in uptime, latency, and operational consistency, not marketing agility.

MPE overlaps in its concern for developer experience and maintainability, but its purpose is different: to serve marketing and editorial velocity specifically. Where platform engineering prioritizes scale and standardization across everything, MPE tailors its solutions to the distinct needs of marketing teams.

It’s not Solutions Engineering or Developer Advocacy

Solutions engineers and developer advocates are external-facing roles. They help customers adopt products, or market to developers, translating between technical and business audiences out in the world.

MPE is internal-facing. It builds the underlying framework within a company, the systems, workflows, and integrations that marketing teams operate on every day.

It’s not just a Marketing Technologist

Marketing technologists typically focus on configuring SaaS tools, CRMs, email platforms, analytics dashboards, and live close to or within marketing operations. They rarely design custom architecture or maintain production codebases.

MPE does though. It’s engineering work, not tool configuration. It involves writing and maintaining code, designing system architectures, and building long-lived internal platforms that marketing functions depend on.

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Marketing Platform Engineering sits close to these roles, which is why it’s easy to misread, but also why it’s powerful. It intersects with growth, platform, and solutions work, but it isn’t a mash-up of them. It’s its own practice with its own mandate: to build the foundational systems that make modern marketing possible.

Getting clear about what MPE isn’t is the first step. It creates space for what it is and why it matters. In the next post, we’ll dig into the impact of marketing platform engineering.

I’ve been thinking about the direction of my career a lot recently, and reflecting on the twisting turns and bends it has taken so far. I do this often, and for the last 3 years or so, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a phase of experimentation and going where the wind blows.

And I came to the realization that maybe I’ve been growing into a marketing platform engineer all this time.

There’s surprisingly little information out there about the kind of engineer I feel I am. I really only found two articles that seem to vibe with what I was thinking:

• This piece from Pantheon
• This blog post from someone in Europe

The problem is that both use the term marketing engineer, which means something altogether different than what I mean.

So I’m calling it marketing platform engineering.

What is marketing platform engineering?

Marketing platform engineering is the craft of building the systems and workflows that enable marketing teams to work at their best.

In practice, this might mean designing a CMS tailored to editorial needs, integrating data collection into an existing website or app, or orchestrating smart workflows and service integrations to power complex campaigns.

It’s not the work of marketing itself, it’s the platform that marketing operates on. The infrastructure that lets campaigns launch faster, content scale cleanly, and insights flow back into strategy.

Doing this well requires fluency in both marketing and engineering. You have to understand the value of strong design, clear brand expression, and persuasive copy, while also mastering the engineering side: performance, tech stacks, coding best practices, accessibility, security, and scalability.

A successful marketing platform engineer sits at the intersection of these skills, able to fluently speak to both marketers and engineers in their language.

Why does this matter?

Marketing is becoming increasingly platform-driven and multidisciplinary. Modern marketing teams don’t just write copy and launch campaigns, they orchestrate content across dozens of surfaces, analyze user behaviour in real time, run rapid experiments, and demand seamless collaboration between design, editorial, data, and engineering.

But most engineering orgs still treat marketing as an aside: something you build a quick CMS for, bolt on a form or analytics tag, and call it done. Others dedicate engineering teams to marketing but fail to take their work seriously. The result? Marketing teams are often stuck using fragile, siloed, or overly generic systems that slow them down, while engineering teams are frustrated by unclear requirements and one-off requests that prevent them from growing as a mature function.

Sometimes this work gets outsourced to agencies or vendors¹, but usually only in fragments, a CMS build here, an analytics setup there, an integration for a single campaign. Because they’re brought in for isolated deliverables, they often lack the full context of the marketing strategy, tech stack, and long-term goals.

Without that continuity, the solutions are more likely to be shallow or brittle: they solve the immediate problem but don’t scale, adapt, or integrate well over time. These vendors can be helpful specialists, but they rarely act as true partners embedded in the ongoing system the way a marketing platform engineering team does.

Marketing platform engineering bridges that gap. It creates durable, scalable systems that marketing teams can trust and build upon, while enabling engineers to work with clear standards and maintainable codebases.

Right now, this role often exists kind of invisibly, held by a handful of people who quietly straddle two worlds without a proper name for what they do. Naming it matters. Recognizing the skill set and the strategic value they provide matters. It gives the work legitimacy, creates a shared identity, and encourages others to intentionally build expertise in it.

How It Differs From Adjacent Roles

There are roles that overlap with pieces of this work, but none capture the whole picture:

• Full-stack engineers build products for end users, not the internal platforms marketing teams rely on. They focus on features and functionality, not editorial workflows, content modelling, or brand governance.
• Growth engineers experiment on user acquisition and conversion funnels. They operate inside the marketing function, not alongside it, and their work is highly metrics-driven and short-cycle, not platform-oriented.
• Marketing technologists choose and configure SaaS tools (CRMs, email platforms, analytics dashboards), but rarely build custom systems or own the underlying codebases the way engineers do.
• Developer advocates or solutions engineers connect marketing and tech from an external-facing angle, but they don’t build internal platforms or integrate marketing workflows deeply into core infrastructure.

A marketing platform engineer is different. She sits between product engineering and marketing, translating needs in both directions and building the connections that lets marketing scale, robust CMS architectures, design systems, analytics pipelines, experimentation frameworks, and cross-service integrations.

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In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into the skill set this role demands and what it takes to build an environment where marketing platform engineers can thrive.

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Footnotes

1. To be clear, I think agencies are great — I’ve worked at a few and ran my own for a time too, and they can massively accelerate the velocity of an internal marketing platform team, give them a strong jumpstart, or be fantastic long-term partners when they have the right amount of context and are treated like true partners. ↩︎