What Marketing Platform Engineering isn’t

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.