Hiring · evaluating · first week
How to hire a marketing engineer
A marketing engineer is the person who makes marketing produce files instead of opinions. That makes them easy to interview — you can look at the work instead of trusting the story about it.
Seven questions, and what a good answer looks like
- Show me a page you shipped and the query it was built for. Good answer: a URL, plus the intent behind it.
- Which event fires when someone converts? Good answer: the event name and where it is defined. Bad answer: "we look at the dashboard".
- How much volume does a test need to be readable? Good answer: a number derived from baseline and the difference that matters. Bad answer: "a few hundred".
- What did you kill last quarter and why? Anyone who has run tests has casualties. No casualties means no tests.
- What breaks first in cold outbound? Good answer: deliverability — domains, authentication, per-mailbox limits, warm-up.
- How do you get a page indexed? Good answer: sitemap, IndexNow, internal links, and AI-crawler policy. Bad answer: "we wait for Google".
- What do I keep when we stop working together? Good answer: the files, the repo, the keys, and a runbook.
How to structure the first week
- Give read access to analytics and the CRM — not a 40-page brief.
- Ask for one page and one measurement in production within five working days. That is the real interview.
- Demand the kill rule in writing before the spend starts.
- Marketing engineer job description generator — free tool: the JD with artifacts due by day 90, the sample-size floors and the screening questions.
Questions people actually ask
What is a marketing engineer?
The person who delivers marketing as working artifacts — pages, tools, tracking, pipelines — instead of as advice. The deliverable is a URL that returns 200 and a number that comes from it.
What should I ask in the interview?
Ask for links, not opinions: show me the page, show me the query it answers, show me the event that fires on the CTA, show me what you killed and why.
Employee, freelancer or agency?
If the work is one defined build with an end state — hire the build. If you need ongoing capacity — hire the monthly loop. An agency makes sense when the work needs a team more than it needs a person who owns the outcome.
What does it cost?
My own reference points are public: $900 for a fixed Sprint, $1,900/month for the running Engine, $2,900 for a full build. Anyone quoting far below that is selling hours, not outcomes.
Next step
Tell me what you sell and what you have already tried. I answer with a fixed scope and a price, not with a call to "explore synergies".