Somewhere between a pull request and a campaign brief, a new job slipped into focus. I keep meeting people who write SQL in the morning, tune email sequences at lunch, and ship a tiny SDK change before dinner. Call them developer marketers. Not devrel as a backstage act, not growth as pure ads. Builders who speak API, care about copy, and treat funnels like they treat CLIs: clear, fast, and measured. The tools pushed us here. AI copilots, server side tracking, consent gates, and privacy by default moved the center of gravity from shiny campaigns to working systems. And with search shaking from AI answers and store pages acting like landing pages, content that ships with product is the new homepage. If you are a marketer who can open a repo, or a developer who writes headlines that convert, this role is already in your path. It is coming fast.
Why now. This month felt like a tipping point. WWDC brought private cloud compute talk and a tighter bridge between on device models and apps. Open source models keep getting smaller and sharper. Google is still reshaping results with AI summaries, which means brand content needs structure, speed, and schema or it vanishes under the fold. On the ad side, consent and first party events are the only safe fuel, and server side pipes are table stakes in many teams I visit. Put this together and the person who can wire analytics, draft docs, ship pixels, and read warehouse tables is pure leverage. That mix is not rare anymore, it is a career. Recruiters are rewriting reqs in real time.
Here is the shape of the developer marketer I keep seeing. They set up tracking with server side tagging, name events with a clean event taxonomy, and send them to the CDP and the warehouse without breaking consent rules. They map that data to product analytics and to channels like email, push, and ads so they can watch activation, payback, and churn by cohort. They speak technical SEO, fix broken canonical tags, add structured data, and care about page speed like a frontend lead. They tend docs like a garden, write API examples that actually run, publish migration notes, and record short screen tours that show the moment of value. They ship small growth code too. A tiny banner that points to a quick start. A pricing copy tweak behind feature flags. A daily cron that backfills missing events. Then they write a post that ranks, a recipe that pairs our tool with another, and a tutorial that closes a gap support keeps seeing. They are not waiting for handoffs. They sit with the PM to shape a trial, pair with the designer to cut steps, and jump with the data lead to chase a weird drop in a funnel. They also bring privacy by design habits. No random pixels. Clear reasons for every field. A consent screen that is plain and fair. They know that first party data is gold and that cheap retargeting is not coming back. On the AI front, they use LLM assistants to draft copy and SQL, but they test every answer. They wire simple RAG flows for help centers, set guardrails, and track feedback like they would track errors. They do not chase shiny toys. They chase lift. The tools in their martech bag are familiar names. Segment or mParticle or RudderStack, paired with Snowflake or BigQuery. GTM server side or EventBridge or a home grown endpoint. Braze, Customer dot io, or HubSpot for journeys. dbt for models, Mode or Hex for notebooks, and a dash in Looker or Superset for the team. Git in the open. Tickets in public. Notes in the repo. If you manage this person, give them goals tied to product behavior not vanity counts. If you are this person, build a simple stack and declare your source of truth. Spend time on naming. Keep a backlog of tests. Write weekly notes that tie shipping to numbers. Run A B tests that matter, like fewer fields at signup or a clearer free tier. Stop green lighting fluff that only moves paid on brand. And yes, this can live inside enterprise. The trick is to earn trust from security and legal early, show previews of data flows, and keep a change log. Share dashboards that connect education to revenue, not just clicks. Work with sales on clean handoffs from docs to trials to demos. Create a small council across data, product, and marketing that meets weekly for thirty minutes. Bring one chart, one bug, and one ship. Ship wins compound when they are small and steady.
Build the bridge between code and growth, and watch the compounding begin.