TL;DR

• DevRel vs GTM Engineering: DevRel engineers focuses on developer relations which is sometimes called as DevRel as well, community building, and technical enablement, while GTM engineers drive go-to-market (GTM) engineering, pipeline acceleration, and automation.

• The role of DevRel Engineer: Bridges product teams and developers, creates SDKs, tutorials, and technical content, measures adoption and community growth; avg. Salary $185K/year.

• The role of GTM Engineer: Automates GTM workflows, targets high-intent leads, accelerates revenue pipelines, and provides market intelligence; avg. Salary $107K/year.

• Strategic Hiring: DevRel suits Seed, Series A developer-focused products, GTM engineers suit Post-Product-Market-Fit, sales-assisted SaaS. Both together create a full-stack growth engine.

Roles have changed, and currently, two job titles have started dominating startup conversations: DevRel Engineers vs GTM Engineers.

Once considered niche roles, they are now being positioned as the new faces of startup growth, shaping how products reach users and how companies scale.

But while “what is a GTM engineer” and “what is DevRel” are trending growth positions at B2B SaaS startups, very few companies, including Infrasity, have actually nailed how these roles should work in practice. GTM engineering is still early, with fewer than 150 job postings in the last 3 months and developer relations continues to evolve from community engagement to measurable growth-driving initiatives.

The image is a screenshot of LinkedIn job listings for GTM Engineers, visually supporting the claim that GTM engineering is an emerging but fast-growing role. It shows multiple active postings for "Go-To-Market (GTM) Engineer" positions from companies.

We’ve seen this shift firsthand while working with YC-backed B2B SaaS startups, such as Aviator, Qodo, and Series A/B SaaS companies. The lines between go-to-market vs developer relations are blurring, creating a need for professionals who can combine technical proficiency, data literacy, automation skills, and community-building expertise into one seamless growth motion.

In this blog, I’ll break down DevRel Engineer vs GTM Engineer, and why these roles are important in the current scenario, and how to decide what your B2B SaaS startup actually needs next.

Understanding the Role of a DevRel Engineer

Developer Relations or DevRel engineers are being measured on engagement, adoption, and bottom-line impact. They sit at the intersection of product, marketing, and community and they are your company’s direct connection to developers.

A DevRel engineer bridges between your product teams and the external developer community. They bring developer feedback back into the product roadmap, create scalable educational resources, and lower the time-to-value for new users.

The image above shows a sample of one of our customers, DevZero’s configuration file for setting up a Python development environment. If you’re a Python user, you can give these starter templates created by Infrasity a try. A template like this lets you spin up a ready-to-use Python workspace with all dependencies pre-installed and saves a developer’s time and allowing them to code faster.

Let’s take a look at the roles and responsibilities a DevRel engineer is expected to perform:

1. Technical Storytelling:
   Developers hate marketing fluff. Instead, they want to know why a product exists, what problem it solves, and how it fits into their workflow. Technical storytelling turns complex product features into relatable narratives that resonate with real developer problems.

   Example: Infrasity writes engineering content for some of the fast-growing B2B SaaS AI companies like Qodo and Firefly, which frame everyday developer pain points, such as “how to create a devcontainer feature,” and show how our customers solve them. This creates a natural pull for adoption because developers see themselves in the story.

   

2. Code-First Advocacy:
   The fastest way to win developer trust is through code, not pitch decks. DevRel engineers build samples, SDKs, and quickstart guides so developers can immediately test-drive the product
   Instead of a long product overview, we ship a repo with working code and comments so developers save their time. An example is given in the picture below for better understanding.
   

3. Community Building:
   A community turns your product into a movement and DevRel engineers engage in places developers already hang out. These platforms can include - Reddit community, X (Twitter) discussions, Discord servers, and build micro-communities that become self-sustaining over time.

   Example: We repurpose long-form content into 500-800-word mini-blogs and share them across dev forums. This builds reach, credibility, and a feedback loop for future product improvements.

4. Public Speaking & Content:
   DevRel engineers are the public face of your technology. They speak at conferences, join panels, and create videos, blogs, and technical walkthroughs that drive awareness.

   Example: Our team represented at KubeCon 2025 and Startup MahaKumbh 2024. This resulted in high-intent developer leads and inbound partnership requests.

5. Empathy for Developers:
   DevRel is about solving real problems, not pushing features. This means listening deeply to feedback, understanding what frustrates developers, and advocating internally to improve product experience.
   When onboarding a new market, we first talk to local developer communities, map their pain points, and adjust messaging and examples before entering that market.

   Example: For one of our customers, Scalekit, who works around authentication and authorisation. We highlight the developers’ pain points and market trends in their content through a hypothetical scenario or get real pain points mentioned by a developer in any developer community. Once we have discovered the pain points, we showcase how Scalekit solves them or plans to solve them.

6. Metrics-Driven Growth:
   Good DevRel isn’t just about “vibes” but about measurable impact. DevRel engineers track metrics to get a glimpse of their growth. What metrics?
   These metrics include documentation page impressions, SDK downloads, community signups, time-to-first-activation, and developer retention.

   Example: Infrasity measures how easily developers discover customers through new visitors on the website, booker demos on CRMs like Hubspot and analyzes how fast they onboard, and how many become active users. Once we have the data, we optimize content and code samples to accelerate these numbers. We also monitor GitHub stars to gauge interest in their open-source repositories. Once we have the data, we optimize content and code samples to accelerate these numbers.

Cost of hiring a DevRel Engineer: $185,000/year, typically 5 years of experience.

A good DevRel will secure your entrance into new markets, onboarding new developer communities, while maintaining brand presence. I personally think partnering with Infrasity is a better choice than hiring DevRel engineers individually at a MUCH lower cost!

Understanding the Role of a GTM Engineer

Suppose DevRel engineers are the voice of developers. They are the tech-savvy strategists who fix what is broken in GTM efforts. This is a relatively new role but extremely in demand and has been silently reshaping and shifting how the B2B SaaS companies sell to their customers.

GTM engineering is about bringing technology, automation, and data together to solve hard GTM problems: ICP targeting, lead routing, pipeline acceleration, CAC reduction, and more.

A GTM engineer is essentially a growth hire, but unlike a growth marketer, they focus on a sales-led or sales-assisted funnel rather than a product-led one. They are often embedded within RevOps or Growth teams and are responsible for identifying friction points in the customer journey and running automated processes.

Key role discussed:

1. Build Revenue-Generating Systems

   • Designing and implementing automated outbound campaigns using GTM tools like Clay, Apollo, Outreach, or even custom-built workflows.

   Example: Infrasity uses Apollo to reach out to new customers

   

   The above image shows a live view of Infrasity’s dashboard on Apollo, demonstrating how GTM engineers use automation tools to execute outbound campaigns at scale. This ties directly to the example above, where Infrasity leverages Apollo to reach new customers efficiently. The dashboard highlights prospect lists, messaging sequences, and engagement tracking

   • Creating data pipelines that surface high-intent prospects based on usage patterns, integrations, or channel engagement.
   • Build personalized, multi-channel messaging sequences that drive higher response rates and accelerate the pipeline.

The image shows Infrasity’s Reddit Marketing Workflow, a visual representation of how GTM engineers build personalized, multi-channel messaging sequences. The workflow starts with client onboarding, followed by audience research to identify relevant subreddits and communities. It then maps audience personas, creates tailored content for each stage of engagement, and distributes messaging across targeted Reddit threads.

• Develop and use sales enablement resources that clearly articulate the business value and cost savings during the discovery calls

2. Generate & Close Pipeline

   • Own revenue targets end-to-end from first touch to closed deal, ensuring full accountability for pipeline performance.
   • Conduct discovery sessions with prospects to assess their current growth requirements and recommend solutions.
   • Navigate complex enterprise sales cycles with multiple decision-makers, including C-suites and Marketing teams.
   • Price and structure deals intelligently based on usage, channel mix, and ROI considerations.

3. Market & Product Intelligence

   • Synthesize customer feedback into actionable product insights for engineering and product teams.
     Example: After analyzing conversations with one of our customers, Firefly, we refined their messaging and adjusted blog topics to better reflect what developers were actually searching for.
   • Identify new use cases and expansion opportunities within existing customer accounts to drive net revenue retention.
     Example: We predicted the upcoming rapid surge in AI, keeping an eye on recent Product Hunt listings, Dev Hunt listings, and recent YC funding trends way back in the last quarter of 2024 and changed our messaging and positions as the early-stage accelerator for the fastest-growing AI teams like Qodo, Lovable, Vapi, Botgauge AI, etc.
   • Stay ahead of industry trends, channel requirements, and GTM innovation trends to future-proof the motion.
   • Our team keeps a close watch on product capabilities and ensures that content, messaging, and positioning reflect what actually drives value for enterprise buyers.
     Example: Our team, prior to visiting the Kubecon 2025 at Hyderabad event, analysed the vertical pattern for the exhibitors and observed it to be majorly around observability and monitoring, therefore changed the showcased case studies for the Obsv companies we have worked with, like Middleware, Tracetest.

4. Growth at Scale

   • Document, templatize, and standardize successful outbound campaigns and messaging strategies for repeatability.
   • Build reusable demos, integration guides, and technical resources to accelerate enablement for both sales and customers.
   • Sharing learnings across GTM teams to create a growth effect and improving organizational playbooks over time.

   Example: For each customer, we deliver weekly or monthly reports with detailed performance breakdowns across LinkedIn campaigns, SEO, and content marketing, helping them double down on what’s working.

5. Cross-Functional & Strategic Leadership

   • Lead technical discussions with executives and enterprise stakeholders, translating complex solutions into simple, actionable plans.

Cost of hiring a GTM Engineer: $107,100/year, typically 3–5 years of experience.

Demystifying DevRel Engineers Vs GTM Engineers

I have created a table for you to understand what differentiates DevRel Engineers from GTM Engineers

Role	Primary Focus	When to Hire	Key Metrics	Example Output
DevRel Engineer	Community building, developer adoption, technical enablement	Seed → lSeries A for B2D products	Time-to-first-activation, community growth, documentation usage	SDKs, sample apps, docs, conference talks
GTM Engineer	Automation of GTM workflows, pipeline acceleration, and experiment design	Post-Product-Market-Fit, Series A+ for sales-assisted SaaS	Pipeline velocity, CAC, SQL→ Closed Won conversion	Automated outbound, lead enrichment, ICP targeting scripts

Yes, both roles overlap more than you’d expect, but the difference is pretty visible. DevRel is typically about developer engagement, while GTM engineering is about pipeline conversion, but together, they create a full-stack growth engine.

The process can be extensive when hiring DevRel engineers and GTM engineers. Instead of going through this lengthy process, I’d recommend you choose a B2B SaaS company that offers you both services without compromising the quality.

Infrasity can help you with a team of seasoned developers, so that compromising on the skill set, experience and quality is not a chance because choosing an agency means it is:

• Cost Cutting: Reduce the cost of trial-and-error hiring.

• Industry Expertise: We’ve worked with YC startups like Aviator, Qodo and Series A/B SaaS companies, building GTM engines and developer programs that scale.

• Speed: Go from idea to live workflow within 10 days.

• Team Advantage: We are the market standard and you can get a team of experts instead of betting everything on a single unicorn hire.

What Comes Next?

The next evolution of DevRel and GTM engineering will be driven by AI, automation, and deeper integration with product strategy; this is rather a given. Rather than just enabling outreach, future GTM engineers will build adaptive workflows that respond to real-time intent signals, automatically enriching data, personalizing outreach, and routing leads without manual effort.

DevRel engineers, meanwhile, will move beyond community building into proactive intelligence gathering: tracking conversations on GitHub, Reddit, and Discord to surface feature requests and developer pain points before they escalate.

Final Thought

Developer relations (DevRel) and GTM engineering are no longer “nice-to-have” functions; they’re the backbone of how modern B2B SaaS startups grow. DevRel engineers ensure developers can adopt, love, and advocate for your product. GTM engineers make sure your revenue motion runs like a well-oiled machine by automating workflows and accelerating the pipeline.

Understanding what is a GTM engineer vs what is DevRel isn’t about picking one over the other, it’s about recognizing where your company is in its growth journey. If you’re still building a developer-first product, a DevRel engineer will help you win trust and adoption. If you’re scaling sales-led growth, a GTM engineer will help you maximize efficiency and hit revenue goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How to find a DevRel Engineer?

Finding the right DevRel engineer starts with clarifying your company’s needs. If you’re early-stage, you’ll want someone who can wear multiple hats, building docs, nurturing developer communities, and creating technical content that drives adoption. Mid-to-late-stage startups may need a specialist who can scale developer relations programs, run community events, and measure impact through metrics like GitHub stars, SDK downloads, and developer retention.

You can source DevRel talent through: Developer communities (GitHub, Discord, Reddit, Twitter/X). Specialized hiring platforms for DevRel and go-to-market (GTM) engineering roles and Industry events and conferences (where many DevRel engineers already speak or mentor).

2. What’s the future of GTM engineering?

The future of GTM engineering is automation-first and AI-driven. GTM engineers will own the entire GTM tech stack, from CRM workflows to AI-powered lead scoring and personalized outreach. They’ll become a core function alongside RevOps and Growth, making GTM engineering a future-proof career with strong demand across Series A+ SaaS companies.

3. How much does a DevRel cost?

DevRel engineers earn highly competitive salaries, typically starting around $150,000–$185,000/year depending on experience, seniority, and company stage.

For early-stage startups, you may find strong DevRel candidates in the $140K–$160K range, while mid-to-late-stage companies often pay $180K+, especially for engineers who can prove measurable impact in scaling developer communities, driving product adoption, and shaping go-to-market engineering efforts.