GTM Engineer

GTM Engineer – Kitaru & ZenML

Overview: The Person Who Turns Open Source into Design Partners

We’re hiring a GTM Engineer to own the motion that turns curious developers into design partners – and design partners into the people who tell us what Kitaru and ZenML should become next.

One-line version: someone who can whiteboard an integration architecture in the morning, pitch it to a Head of AI in the afternoon, write the blog post that explains it on the train home, and show up at a meetup that weekend to talk about it. Technical enough that engineers trust them. Commercial enough that founders take their meetings.

You’ll work across our two open-source products: ZenML, the AI platform thousands of teams use to orchestrate ML pipelines and agent workflows, and Kitaru, our brand-new durable execution layer for Python agents – crash recovery, human-in-the-loop, replay from any checkpoint. ZenML has years of production trust and a warm community giving us a steady stream of signals. Kitaru just launched, has no playbook yet, and is defining a category. That’s where you’ll spend most of your week.

This is not a sales role. It’s not a marketing role. It’s not exactly a DevRel role either. It’s the role that creates new categories by finding the first ten companies willing to co-build the product with you, shipping the integrations and content that get them in the door, and feeding everything you learn straight back into product strategy. If “technical GTM” is a thing, this is the job.

We expect you to be AI-pilled. You’re not just building for AI engineers, you are one. You have strong opinions about which agent frameworks ship and which won’t survive 2027. You can defend those opinions in a room of engineers who’ll push back. But AI-pilled ? vibes-pilled – you read every diff your agent produces, you can architect a real system on a whiteboard, and your judgment is yours.

Key Responsibilities (The “Jobs to be Done”)

• Hunt and Land Design Partners: Identify the top companies who most need Kitaru’s durable execution or ZenML’s pipelines, get a real conversation with the right person, and turn it into a working POC. This is outbound, targeted, founder-style hustle – not inbound qualification. You should be excited about cold-emailing a CTO with a thesis they haven’t heard yet.
• Co-Build with Customers: Once design partners are on board, you’re their internal champion. You architect the integration with them on the whiteboard, ship the first demo yourself, write the case study afterward, and make sure their Slack questions are answered same-day.
• Ship the Integrations That Get Us In the Door: Build integration code for the frameworks our users live in – PydanticAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agents SDK, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, memory layers like cognee, vector stores, graph stores. Each integration is both a product and a marketing asset. You write the code, the example app, and the launch post.
• Shape Where Kitaru Goes Next: Sit in product strategy conversations as a peer, not a stakeholder. The product vision for Kitaru is being written right now – your customer conversations and integration directly inform what we build. You’ll write spec docs, argue with the founders, and own pieces of the roadmap.
• Own the Technical Narrative: Write the blog posts, give the meetup talks, host the workshops. Not generic content – the specific thing that explains why durable execution matters to someone debugging a 3,000-step agent run at midnight. Both real technical depth and a sense of when to stop being technical.
• Live in the Community: Slack, GitHub, Discord, X, Hacker News, AI meetups across Europe and beyond. You spot the user asking the question that’s actually a Kitaru-shaped problem and reply within the hour. You’re the human face of the product in places where the product doesn’t speak for itself yet.
• Build the GTM Playbook as You Go: There isn’t one yet for Kitaru. You’ll figure out what outreach lands, which channels convert, what design-partner profiles work, what content compounds, and document it so the next hire after you isn’t starting from zero.

Tech You’ll Work With

• Our Products: ZenML (pipelines, stacks, snapshots, deployer, control plane) and Kitaru (durable flows, checkpoints, replay, human-in-the-loop).
• The Code You’ll Write: Python 3.11+ (decorators, async, type hints – IC-level competence; you don’t need to be a production-shipping engineer, but you do need to write code that runs). Enough TypeScript to update a docs site or example app when it matters.
• The AI/Agent Ecosystem: PydanticAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agents SDK, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI. Vector stores, graph stores, memory layers. You know the landscape well enough to credibly position us inside it.
• The GTM Stack: Attio, GitHub Projects, Slack Connect with customers, GitHub for both code and conversation, LinkedIn for outreach.
• The AI Coding Stack: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, MCP servers in the loop connected to your own custom skills – whatever makes you ship 3x faster. We expect you to use them. We don’t expect you to apologize for them.

What We’re Looking For

• Technical-Enough Builder: 2–5 years building or marketing developer tools, ideally in AI/ML/data infra. You’ve shipped code that real engineers used – a side project, a library, an integration, a demo app that got attention. You don’t need to be a 10-year backend dev. You do need to be the person engineers don’t dismiss when you walk into a technical conversation.
• Design-Partner Closer: You’ve done outbound to technical buyers before – DevRel that turned into pipeline, BD, founding sales, technical PMM, or growth at a dev-first startup. You’re not afraid of cold-emailing a CTO with a sharp thesis. You know how to make the first meeting count.
• AI-Pilled, Not Vibes-Pilled: You build agents on weekends. You have opinions about which frameworks are real and which are demos. You can architect a memory layer or an integration on a whiteboard and explain why one approach wins. The AI is your tool; the taste is yours.
• Writer Engineers Actually Read: You have a blog, a Substack, conference talks, or GitHub READMEs that engineers enjoyed. You treat writing as a product. Fluff makes you physically uncomfortable.
• Community-Native: You already spend time in the rooms where AI infra is being talked about – meetups, hackathons, the right Discords, AI community events. You know how to be useful in those rooms without being salesy.
• Product Taste for Developer Tools: You feel pain when an API is clunky. You’ve used tools that made you love programming and tools that made you quit. You can describe why in a way that helps the product team ship a better version.
• Founder-Style Operator: You don’t wait for a process to exist before you act. You don’t need an SDR motion, a content calendar, or three approvals to do useful work. You build the function as you ship it.
• Low Ego, High Standards: You’ll get pushed back on by engineers who’ve shipped more than you. You’ll get pushed back on by a co-founder who’ll argue you into a corner. You’d rather be corrected than wrong.

This Role Is Probably Not For You If…

• You want a defined territory, a quota, and a CRM dashboard to log calls in.
• You’d rather write the content than have the conversation that sources the content.
• You see “technical enough to whiteboard an integration” as a stretch goal rather than a baseline.
• You want a marketing role with no commercial accountability, or a sales role with no technical depth.
• “There isn’t a playbook yet – go build one” sounds stressful rather than exciting.

(If any of these describe you, we genuinely think you’d be happier somewhere else, and we’d rather tell you upfront than waste your time.)

Why This Role Matters

• Two Products, One Mission: ZenML has thousands of teams running in production and a warm community giving us a steady stream of signals. Kitaru just launched and is defining what durable execution for Python agents looks like. You get product-market-fit fuel from one and greenfield category-building from the other.
• Founding Seat, Real Strategy: This is the first dedicated GTM-engineering hire for Kitaru. You won’t inherit a motion — you’ll invent it. Your customer conversations directly shape what we build.
• Open Source, Real Distribution: Both products are Apache 2.0. Every integration you ship lands in front of thousands of developers via our GitHub, our Slack, our docs. Your work is in the public record (and your GitHub will do the talking at your next job, though we hope you stay).
• Use What You Sell: Build Kitaru. Use Kitaru to build Kitaru. Use Kitaru to automate your own GTM ops. The dogfooding loop is real and tight.
• No Layers, No Politics: Founders are engineers. Engineers talk to users. Nobody’s hiding behind Jira. You’ll work directly with Hamza (CTO, 10+ years in MLOps) and Adam (CEO, co-founder) from day one.