Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 6w ago
I built a fully automated B2B outbound engine inside Clay from scratch, taking raw firmographics all the way to verified decision-makers and custom cold emails.
To make the scenario realistic, I picked an existing YC-backed developer tool as my benchmark case study. (Vendo (YC S26) it is)
Here's how the end-to-end system works and why I structured the scoring logic this way:
→ Target Definition: Sourced US-based B2B SaaS accounts (11–200 employees) experiencing feature backlog fatigue and limited engineering bandwidth.
→ Contact Waterfall: Built a dynamic buyer hierarchy hunting for Product Leaders (Head/VP of Product) first, falling back to Engineering Leads, and defaulting to Founders, merging them into a single clean Decision-Maker column with verified LinkedIn URLs.
→ Custom Scoring Engine: Designed a multi-layered formula matrix where every weight directly reflects technical fit and intent:
• Size Score (+2/1): Weighted 50–200 employees higher (+2) due to immediate request volume, while 11–49 (+1) signals high growth potential.
• Industry Score (+2): Prioritized B2B SaaS & DevTools where in-app customizations are a core requirement.
• Core TechStack (+2): Targeted modern frontend frameworks (React, Next.js, Vue, TS) where Vendo (YC S26)'s UI embeds seamlessly.
• API & Infra (+1): Verified modern backend infrastructure (GraphQL, OpenAPI, Vercel) ready to power user-built micro-apps.
• Integration Score (+2): Detected active marketplaces/directories using Claygent,…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 3w ago
GTM engineers don’t need to hop among 20 different tools to build a high-converting outbound engine.
The more tools you add, the more fragile the system becomes.
So, here’s a different approach where Claude Code as the control plane for outbound.
Everything from data → enrichment → signals → personalization → delivery can live in one system.
Let’s see how the full pipeline looks like:
1️⃣ Pull data and enrich it
- Connect Apollo.io / LeadMagic / @Prospeo or other providers through APIs/MCP.
- Run waterfall enrichment across multiple providers to find verified emails and phone numbers without manually moving records around.
2️⃣ Clean the data before it touches your CRM
- Normalize job titles.
- Standardize company domains.
- Remove duplicates.
- Validate the records.
- Run the data cleaning logic directly inside Claude Code instead of maintaining another workflow.
3️⃣ Find the signals that actually matter
Use Firecrawl or Exa to pull live company data.
- Job postings.
- Website changes.
- Hiring activity.
- Company news.
- Product launches.
Then score every account against your ICP and the signals you actually care about.
4️⃣ Turn signals into 1:1 personalization
- Feed the account context into Claude. (MUST)
- Generate personalized messaging based on what is actually happening at the company.
- Build the entire multi-touch sequence from the same context.
5️⃣ Push qualified leads straight to your sender
- Once the records are enriched, validated and personalize…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 5d ago
How much does a GTM Engineer actually make in 2026?
$50K–$250K a year. Yes, even if you're working remotely from India.
Go-to-Market Engineering is one of the most interesting career paths to explore right now, especially if you enjoy technology, AI, automation, and solving business problems.
But what exactly is a GTM Engineer, and why are companies willing to pay this much?
A Go-to-Market Engineer builds the systems that help companies find the right customers, gather better prospect data, identify buying signals, and make their sales and marketing processes more efficient.
Think of things like:
→ Building AI-powered prospect research workflows.
→ Enriching thousands of CRM records without manually researching every contact.
→ Connecting tools like Clay, n8n, and a CRM to create reliable workflows.
→ Identifying companies that are more likely to buy and helping sales teams prioritise them.
You're not just using tools. You're building the infrastructure behind how a company goes to market.
Here's what compensation can look like in the US market:
- $70K–$100K/year: Early-career opportunities
- $100K–$150K/year: GTM Engineer roles
- $150K–$250K+/year: Senior and specialised roles
That's approximately ₹64 lakh to ₹1.82 crore a year across the full range, depending on the exchange rate.
And here's the exciting part.
You don't have to live in the US to pursue a $100K+ career.
Companies hire talent across borders, and remote opportunities can open doors for people in In…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 5w ago
Most SDRs spend 20+ hours a week lost in manual busywork: checking LinkedIn profiles, vetting ICP fit, hunting for recent company news, and writing outreach from scratch.
That’s 45 minutes wasted per lead that could be spent selling.
I built a simple Slack + n8n + Clay pipeline to solve this.
A rep just drops a LinkedIn URL into Slack. The workflow instantly scrapes the profile, qualifies the ICP, extracts company signals, and replies in the thread with a ready-to-send personalized draft.
For this build, I configured the ICP for a GTM engineering agency selling to cybersecurity companies, but it easily adapts to any market.
Hi I'm Deblina, a GTM engineer and this is exactly what I do: build systems that remove friction, bridge the gap between sales and tech, and hand hours of high-leverage time back to sales and marketing teams.
Connect with me Deblina Boral
Comment “WORKFLOW” and I’ll send over the full setup doc!
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 4d ago
$100K+ GTM Engineers don’t need 50 tools. They need 3 core skills + the right stack.
In my last post, I talked about how GTM Engineering can open doors to some seriously interesting career opportunities, including high-paying roles with international companies.
A lot of you wanted to know how to get started and which tools you actually need to learn.
So, let’s break it down. 👇
Start with these three categories. Just pick one tool.
1. Orchestration: Clay or Bitscale
This is where you bring your prospect research together. Learn how to find buying signals, identify companies that match your ICP, enrich prospect data, and build workflows that help sales teams focus on the right accounts.
2. Sequencing: Instantly.ai, SendKit.ai or Smartlead.
Finding the right prospects is only half the job. You also need to understand how to turn good data into relevant outbound campaigns, personalise messages at scale, and build a reliable process for reaching potential customers.
3. Claude Code
Learn to build faster. Claude Code can help you write scripts, automate repetitive tasks, and build small tools that solve problems without doing everything manually.
A few bonus skills that can take you further:
→ Data providers: Prospeo.io or Apollo.io to find contact information and enrich your prospect lists (this is the 1st step in outbound)
→ Automation: n8n, Make or Zapier to connect tools and build workflows that run without constant manual intervention.
This skill become particula…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 8w ago
Don’t automate personalization. Automate the research that creates it.
Most outbound teams want “personalized” messaging.
So they automate AI-written first lines.
That’s backwards.
The expensive part isn’t writing the sentence.
It’s figuring out what’s actually worth saying.
You can automate a huge part of that research.
Take a list of 500 target companies.
Instead of manually researching each one, build a workflow that pulls signals like:
→ New job openings
→ Hiring volume by department
→ Recent funding
→ Product launches
→ Headcount changes
→ New market expansion
→ Tech stack changes
→ Recent company announcements
Then classify those signals.
For example:
- Signal: Company is hiring 5 SDRs + 1 RevOps manager.
- Detected change: They’re building a more structured sales function.
- Potential implication: Their sales processes, CRM and reporting requirements are likely getting more complex.
- Relevant buyer: VP Sales / RevOps.
- Outbound hypothesis: They may be evaluating or rebuilding their GTM infrastructure.
Now you have something worth personalizing around.
And the workflow can do this across hundreds of accounts.
The important distinction is the system doesn’t decide what the company “needs.”
It finds evidence.
It turns that evidence into a hypothesis.
A human decides whether the hypothesis is actually worth acting on.
That’s where GTM Engineering gets interesting.
Not: “AI wrote 500 personalized emails.”
But: I built a system that continuously finds…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 2mo ago
90% of outbound doesn’t fail because of bad copy.
It fails long before the first email is ever sent.
If you think outbound starts here:
→ Write a sequence
→ Launch a campaign
→ Wait for replies
It doesn’t.
It starts weeks before that.
With questions like:
⮑ Are we targeting the right ICP?
⮑ Is our data actually accurate?
⮑ Can our email infrastructure land in the inbox?
⮑ Are LinkedIn accounts properly set up?
⮑ Is the CRM clean enough to avoid duplicate outreach?
⮑ Do all the tools actually talk to each other?
Only after all of that do you write the first message.
Imagine giving two teams the exact same email copy.
One has verified data, healthy domains, warmed-up inboxes, connected CRM, and a clean outreach workflow.
The other has none of it.
The copy doesn’t change.
The results do.
That’s why I think GTM Engineering is becoming one of the most important functions in modern B2B companies.
It isn’t about sending more emails. It’s about building a system where every part of outbound works together.
Because great outreach isn’t written.
It’s engineered.
Want to work with me? ✉️ workwithdeblina@gmail.com
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · 5w ago
Most early-stage founders are allergic to cold outbound. And honestly? They’re right to feel that way.
Cold outbound is slow and expensive:
1. You have to buy secondary domains and mailboxes so you don’t burn your main company domain.
2. You have to wait 3 to 4 weeks just to warm up those inboxes safely so Google doesn’t blacklist you.
3. You spend hundreds of dollars on scraping databases, email verification, and sending tools before you send a single message.
And after all that? You're still pitching total strangers who don't know you, don't trust you, and delete your email in 2 seconds.
So what's the fix?
Pairing it with CONTENT ENGINEERING
Cold outreach takes time because there is zero context on who you’re. Content engineering creates that context before you ever reach out.
Here is how I run this system for founders as a Content & GTM Engineer:
1. Founder-Led Problem Content: I write and publish posts from the founder’s and core team’s profiles. Not generic motivation, but teardowns of the exact technical or operational headaches their ideal clients deal with every day.
2. Lead Qualification from Engagement: When people like, comment, or react, they are signaling interest. I scrape those engagers, filter out the students and casual scrollers, and verify who actually matches the company's ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
3. Context-Driven Outbound: Now, the outbound is no longer cold. When I reach out to them on LinkedIn or email, they already recognize the founder’…
Deblina Boral
Go-To-Market Engineer building outbound infrastructure for B2B growth | Ex- Soda.io’26, McKinsey NGWL’25, HPAIR’25 · today
The $100K problem companies are paying GTM Engineers to solve.
Imagine a company has 10,000 prospects list ready but nobody knows which ones are actually ready to buy.
The sales team spends hours researching companies, finding emails, updating CRMs, and figuring out whom to contact first.
That’s a LOT of time and money going down the drain.
This is where GTM Engineers come in. Here’s what they actually do:
1. Find the right prospects.
Use data providers like Apollo.io / Prospeo / LeadMagic etc to find companies and decision-makers that match your ideal customer profile.
2. Build enrichment and buying-signal workflows.
Use Clay to combine data from multiple providers, run waterfall enrichment, identify buying signals, and prioritise/score prospects based on relevant information.
3. Build multi-channel campaigns.
→ Email: Use platforms like Sendkit.ai to run personalised email outreach and follow-ups.
→ LinkedIn: Use HeyReach.io to automate LinkedIn outreach sequences.
The idea is to coordinate both channels so prospects receive relevant touchpoints instead of relying on a single email.
5. Automate repetitive sales tasks.
Automatically update CRM records, route leads to the right SDR, trigger follow-ups, and notify the team when a prospect shows buying intent. Use tools like n8n, Make or Zapier
6. Track performance and improve the system.
Measure reply rates, meetings booked, conversion rates, and campaign performance. Identify what’s working, fix what’s not, an…
