One title, two jobs: what each one builds, what it pays in the U.S., and how to hire the one your team needs.
A growth engineer is usually a software engineer on a product’s growth team who codes experiments in signup, onboarding, and pricing, at a $193,000 median base (Recruiting From Scratch, 2026). Some teams mean a marketing-side builder, and that job is a marketing engineer. Hire for the problem, not the title. GrowthPair doesn’t place software engineers. For the marketing-side builder, it places full-time Marketing Engineers for about $4,000 a month, all-in.
PostHog’s guide to the role describes an engineer who works on whatever grows the company’s numbers, like signups, subscriptions, and revenue, wherever that work lives. At PostHog, that meant A/B tests on signup options, in-app messaging, and a billing service. PostHog separates the job from growth hacking, which it says leans on non-product, non-technical fixes.
The Pragmatic Engineer places growth engineering between product engineering and marketing. Its March 2025 guide, co-written with Alexey Komissarouk, who led growth engineering at MasterClass, defines it as “the writing of code to make a company money.” The guide splits the work three ways:
The same guide says companies usually start a growth engineering team at Series B or later. PostHog makes a similar point: a growth engineer needs a product with traction to optimize.
Most postings for “growth engineer” mean a software engineer who ships production code inside your product. A smaller group uses the title for someone who builds for the marketing team. Growth.Talent’s own definition shows the overlap. It calls the role a full-stack engineer embedded in the growth or marketing team.
Daphne Tideman at Growth Waves counts three flavors (June 2026): a product growth engineer, a data-led growth engineer, and a GTM or AI engineer who builds systems for sales and marketing. She questions whether the third should be called a growth engineer at all. Her advice is to pick the flavor before you write the job post.
For a buyer, the split that matters is where the work ships:
| Product-side growth engineer | Marketing engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| What they build | Signup, onboarding, activation, paywall, and pricing flows, plus notifications and experiment tooling | Landing pages, lead magnets, AI agents, workflow automations, and tracking |
| Where the work ships | Your product’s codebase, reviewed by engineering | Marketing’s own stack: the CMS, AI and no-code tools, and the CRM |
| Typical tools | React and a backend language, plus analytics and A/B testing tools (Anthropic and Lovable postings) | Claude, Cursor, Lovable, n8n, Clay, and Make |
| Who they report to | An engineering or growth lead | A marketing leader |
| Coding bar | Production software. Anthropic prefers 5+ years as a software engineer. | From none to some. Profound’s own Marketing Engineer posting asks for Python or JavaScript. |
| Typical U.S. pay | $193,000 median base (Recruiting From Scratch, June 2026) | $135,000 to $200,000 at Profound (posted May 2026) |
| Loaded monthly cost | About $23,000 at the median | About $16,100 to $23,800 |
| Hire one when | Your signup or activation funnel leaks and the fix lives in the product | Your marketing team waits weeks on engineering for pages, tools, and automations |
GTM engineers are a third builder title, closer to sales. We compare all three in GTM engineer vs growth engineer vs marketing engineer.
Two sources publish growth engineer pay. They use different methods, so here’s each one with its basis.
| Source | Base pay | Based on | Loaded cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruiting From Scratch | $193,000 median. $160,000 at the 25th percentile, $211,000 at the 75th. | 61 growth engineer postings from company career pages, published June 25, 2026 | About $19,000 to $25,100. About $23,000 at the median. |
| Growth.Talent, junior (1 to 3 years) | $100,000 to $140,000 | Its U.S. “anchor” bands, which it labels estimated total comp. No date published. | About $11,900 to $16,700 |
| Growth.Talent, mid (3 to 6 years) | $130,000 to $180,000 | Same | About $15,500 to $21,400 |
| Growth.Talent, senior (6+ years) | $170,000 to $240,000 | Same | About $20,200 to $28,600 |
How we got the last column: benefits were 30.0% of total compensation for U.S. private-industry workers in June 2026, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So divide base pay by 0.70 for the full cost, then by 12 for the month. A $193,000 base works out to about $23,000 a month, before recruiting fees.
Recruiting From Scratch also found a $175,000 median in San Francisco and $179,000 for remote roles. AI companies pay far more. The live postings below run $266,000 to $405,000 in base pay.
We read these postings on October 29, 2026. Every product-side role asks for an experienced full-stack engineer, and most name 4 or 5+ years.
| Company | Title | What the posting asks for | Posted base |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Full Stack Software Engineer, Growth (San Francisco) | The ChatGPT Growth team: account access, notifications, SEO, landing pages, purchase flows, and A/B tests | $266,000 to $385,000, plus equity |
| OpenAI | Software Engineer, GTM Growth Engineering (San Francisco) | AI-powered products for sales and B2B marketing teams. 4+ years as a software engineer. | $266,000 to $405,000, plus equity |
| Anthropic | Staff Software Engineer, Growth (San Francisco, New York, Seattle) | Acquisition, activation, retention, and monetization. Full-stack React and backend. 5+ years preferred. | $320,000 to $405,000 |
| Lovable | Growth Engineer (London) | Onboarding, activation, and monetization flows. React and APIs. 5+ years building products. | Not published |
| Lovable | Marketing Growth Engineer (London) | Tools, automations, and agents for marketing, ad tracking from click to revenue, and landing pages. Still a full-stack engineer with 5+ years. | Not published |
| Profound | Marketing Engineer | A builder inside marketing. Python or JavaScript. | $135,000 to $200,000 |
Lovable’s two posts show the split well. Both are engineering hires, but one builds the product and the other builds for marketing.
Our take: judge the role by its requirements. If the post asks for React, a backend language, and 4+ years as a software engineer, you’re hiring an engineer, whichever team they sit on. If it asks for pages, agents, and automations built with AI tools, you’re hiring a marketing engineer, and you don’t need to pay a $300,000 engineering band for it.
Start with the problem you want fixed.
| If your problem is... | You need | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Users sign up but never reach the product’s value | A product-side growth engineer | The fix ships in your onboarding code |
| You want to test pricing, paywalls, or upgrade flows | A product-side growth engineer | Billing and access control live in the product |
| Landing pages, calculators, and lead magnets take weeks | A marketing engineer | They build in your CMS and AI tools, outside the product |
| Reporting, lead routing, and content ops run by hand | A marketing engineer | Automations in tools like n8n, Make, and Clay |
| You can’t trace ad spend to revenue | A marketing engineer, unless the events must come from your app’s backend | Tracking setup is marketing work. Product events need an engineer. |
Daphne Tideman at Growth Waves suggests a test: write down the five things you most want the hire to spend time on. If they map to more than one kind of growth engineer, fix the scope before you post the role.
A product-side growth engineer is a software engineer. The OpenAI, Anthropic, and Lovable growth postings we read on October 29, 2026 all ask for full-stack engineering, and Anthropic prefers 5+ years as a software engineer.
Plain answer: GrowthPair doesn’t place software engineers, product-side growth engineers included. If this is the hire you need, look in the places below. A marketing engineer shouldn’t be pushing to your production codebase.
When to hire. PostHog’s guide says a growth engineer won’t find traction for you, because they need a product with traction to optimize. daily.dev’s hiring guide (February 2026) adds two conditions: enough traffic for A/B tests to mean something, and leaders who decide with data.
Where to look.
How to vet. daily.dev suggests asking about failed experiments and testing statistics: sample size, stopping a test early, and what to do with a result that’s inconclusive. Put your engineering lead in the loop too, since this hire’s code goes to production.
A marketing engineer builds landing pages, lead magnets, AI agents, and automations inside your marketing team, mostly with AI and no-code tools. Profound launched the title on April 8, 2026. Don’t post this role as “growth engineer.” You’ll get software engineers in your inbox and a pay band set by engineering. More on the title in what a marketing engineer is.
Where to look.
If you’re unsure whether you need a GTM engineer instead, see GTM engineer vs growth engineer vs marketing engineer.
Builder titles are easy to put on a resume. Check what they’ve shipped. These are the checks our marketers run for builder roles, and you can run them yourself.
| Check | What to ask | What a pass looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Built or operated | “Walk me through the last thing you built from scratch. What triggered it?” | A specific page, tool, or workflow, and what changed after it shipped. A weak answer lists tools. |
| Live walkthrough | “Share your screen and open something you built.” | They explain each step without notes and know why it’s there. |
| Failure | “Tell me about an automation that broke.” | How they found out, what it cost, and what they changed after. |
| Marketing judgment | “This landing page converts at 2%. What do you test first?” | The offer and the audience before button colors. |
| AI in production | “Show me a prompt or agent you run. How do you catch bad output?” | A review step or a sample check, and rules for when the AI shouldn’t publish. |
| Written English | A C1 English assessment | Required for every GrowthPair candidate |
These checks sit inside our five-step vetting: a resume screen, a phone interview, a proctored skills assessment, a live interview with a marketer, and your interview. 1.5% of applicants are accepted.
U.S. salaries here include benefits, using the same math as above.
| Option | Cost per month | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Full-time U.S. product-side growth engineer | About $19,000 to $25,100. About $23,000 at the median. | $160,000 to $211,000 middle range, 61 postings (Recruiting From Scratch, June 2026) |
| Full-time U.S. marketing engineer | About $16,100 to $23,800 | Profound’s posted $135,000 to $200,000 band (May 2026) |
| Freelance developer, 20 hours a month | $1,640 to $2,600 | Arc’s U.S. and Canada rate of $82 to $130 an hour (May 2026) |
| Freelance builder, 20 hours a month | $3,000 to $5,000 | GTME Pulse’s mid-level GTM engineer rate of $150 to $250 an hour, the closest published rate for marketing-side builders (March 2026) |
| Agency retainer | About $3,000 to $15,000. Most charge $6,000 to $12,000. | DevCommX, for GTM engineering agencies (July 2026) |
| Full-time Marketing Engineer through GrowthPair | About $4,000, all-in | Our client rate. It covers the marketer’s pay, payroll, benefits, and HR. |
At AI companies, the postings above work out to about $31,700 to $48,200 a month loaded. The full math for the marketing side is in what a marketing engineer costs to hire.
Search “growth engineering agency” and you’ll find agency service pages. Ladder’s 2021 post describes what its growth engineering meant: analytics, tracking, landing pages, campaign automation, and custom reporting. Ladder says it now works with a partner, Saxifrage, for that work. None of the agency pages we opened publishes a price.
Credo’s page was the top result for “hire growth engineers” when we checked. That page is a 2021 blog post on hiring growth engineers into a product team. Credo itself is a matching service. It connects you with pre-vetted marketing and web development agencies, and it doesn’t place individual engineers. Here’s what its pricing page showed on October 29, 2026:
You still pay the agency you pick. An agency or a Credo match makes sense for one project with a finish line, like a tracking overhaul or a site rebuild. Once you want something new built every month, a full-time hire wins on cost, and they keep the context.
GrowthPair placed builders under the title Growth Engineer until October 26, 2026. That day, we renamed the role Marketing Engineer, for two reasons.
It’s the same role under a clearer name. We vet every Marketing Engineer on a 16-tool stack, including Claude, Cursor, Lovable, n8n, Clay, and Make. Every candidate passes our five-step vetting: a resume screen, a phone interview, a proctored skills assessment, a live interview with a marketer, and your interview. 1.5% of applicants are accepted.
We place Marketing Engineers, the marketing-side builders some teams call growth engineers. One rate, about $4,000 a month, covers all of this:
Most clients have their hire working about 3 weeks after signing, and most hires ramp within one week.
A growth engineer writes code that moves a growth metric, like signups, activation, or revenue. That usually means signup and onboarding experiments, paywall and pricing tests, notifications, and the tracking to measure them.
Growth engineering is product engineering aimed at growth metrics, tested through experiments. The Pragmatic Engineer places it between product engineering and marketing, and says teams usually form at Series B or later.
Recruiting From Scratch found a $193,000 median base across 61 postings (June 2026). With benefits, that’s about $23,000 a month. AI companies post $266,000 to $405,000.
A growth engineer ships code inside your product and reports into engineering. A marketing engineer builds pages, tools, and automations for the marketing team, mostly with AI and no-code tools, and reports to marketing.
First decide which one you need. If the fix ships in your product’s code, hire a software engineer through your engineering team or a technical recruiter. If you need pages, tools, and automations for marketing, hire a marketing engineer.
Not product-side ones. We don’t place software engineers. We place Marketing Engineers, who build pages, tools, and automations inside your marketing team for about $4,000 a month, all-in.
