The Marketing Engineer

Cognition crossed $1 billion in revenue run rate in roughly two years. Now, its new SVP of Marketing, Brandon Camhi, is taking on the challenge of scaling its marketing organization to match the company's rapid growth.

With the company growing at an incredible pace, Brandon is rethinking how a modern marketing organization should operate. He's recruiting some of the best talent in the industry, challenging traditional org structures, and putting AI to work across the entire function. One of his first moves? Launching a $10 million billboard campaign across 14 cities in just one week.

In this episode, Brandon joins Profound’s Trevor Pyle to share what he learned scaling marketing at Rippling and how he’s applying those lessons at Cognition. They get into the AI-powered workflows his team is building, why he believes brand investment should start early, how AEO fits into the bigger picture, and why he isn't worried about AI replacing CMOs.

We discuss:
The first priorities when taking over marketing at a billion-dollar company
How a $10 million global billboard campaign came together in just one week
Why Brandon is rethinking traditional marketing org charts
The unconventional recruiting approach he uses to attract top talent
What he learned from his biggest mistakes at Rippling
How Cognition uses Devin to streamline paid ads, lead management, and internal reporting
Why high-quality storytelling matters in enterprise marketing
How AEO connects to everything from customer reviews to social media
The interview exercise Brandon considers more valuable than a case study
Why he isn't worried about AI replacing CMOs
Connect with Brandon:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcamhi/ 
Cognition: https://cognition.com/
Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

One headline change increased Mutiny’s signups by 71 percent overnight. For Matt Ratchford, the company’s entire growth marketing team, it was another lesson in how much leverage a solo marketer can create by focusing on the right problems.

Matt has been helping rebuild Mutiny’s narrative after a pivot from website personalization to an AI sales assistant. Working as a team of one has forced him to be ruthless about prioritization and deliberate about where AI actually adds leverage, shaping everything from Mutiny’s AEO strategy and content systems to its website messaging.

Matt explains how he runs growth in six-to-eight-week bets, why he still cold outreaches to people every day to learn faster, how Mutiny is building systems around AI search and content distribution, and why the best marketers will combine deep domain expertise with the ability to use AI across a much broader range of work.

We discuss:
How Matt runs growth at Mutiny as a one-person marketing team
Why AI can accelerate you in the wrong direction if the process is broken
The six-to-eight-week bet system he uses to prioritize what to work on
The headline change that increased signups by 71 percent overnight
How Mutiny is rebuilding its narrative for the AI search era
Why Matt still cold outreaches to people every day to learn faster
Building AEO and content distribution systems around a team of one
Why deep domain expertise still matters in an AI-powered marketing team
Connect with Matt:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-ratchford-940019142/
Mutiny: https://www.mutinyhq.com/ 
Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

Resources Mentioned:
Matt’s Substack Newsletter: https://mattratchford.substack.com/ 

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

Until this year, webinars at ElevenLabs were mostly ad hoc, run by whoever on the sales team had the bandwidth. Then one person used AI to turn the process into a real system, taking the pipeline from about $100,000 to more than $8 million by the end of H1. 

That’s just one example of how ElevenLabs is using AI to rethink marketing. Luke Harries, who leads growth at the company behind some of the most realistic AI voice models in the world, shares how that thinking extends beyond webinars, from replacing a $40,000 ad localization tool with an AI system that drove $3 million in incremental revenue, to turning this internal tool into a full-fledged product other companies can now use for themselves. 

Luke breaks down what’s working, how they’re measuring AI ROI, and what this shift could mean for the future of marketing.

We discuss:
Why ElevenLabs built its own internal Marketing Engineer role
The real test for whether a background agent is actually working
How one webinar system took pipeline from $100,000 to $8 million
How they replaced a $40,000 localization tool with AI
How a wave of one-star reviews turned into a $10 million ARR product
Why international expansion breaks most SDR systems, and how AI fixed it
Connect with Luke:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-harries/ 
ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io/ 

Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

She used to lose an hour every morning checking dashboards and manually looking for trends. Today, Sam Richard, Chief Revenue Officer at ngrok, has replaced that routine with an AI system that does it for her.

It's one of many systems she's built to give herself more leverage. From managing her family's schedule to monitoring product and customer signals at ngrok, she's constantly looking for repetitive work she can hand off to AI.

Sam explains how she decides between local and frontier models, how LLMs are changing customer acquisition at ngrok, and why she believes the best way to start with AI is simply narrating your day and letting it find the bottlenecks.

We discuss:
How she automated her morning dashboard review
Choosing between local and frontier models
The household AI assistant she built for her family
The AEO and SEO experiments behind ngrok's website rebuild
Why ngrok referrals from LLMs are growing 40 percent month over month
Her advice for any growth leader getting started with AI
Connect with Sam:
X: https://x.com/SamCRichard
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-crowell-richard/
ngrok: https://ngrok.com

Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.

I agents are bringing a new level of automation to ad operations. Aaron Lu, AI Product Lead at Notion, shares how his team is using AI across growth marketing, building agents that automate workflows, monitor spend in real time, and enable capabilities that advertising platforms don't support natively.

Aaron explains how he decides what should become an AI agent versus a simple automation, how he builds feedback loops that improve agents over time, and what it takes to orchestrate multiple agents.

He also breaks down the competitor-monitoring system that won Profound's Marketing Engineering Hackathon and how building with parallel agents changed his workflow.

We discuss:
How a marketer's job shifted from doing the work to designing AI systems
Why a good cost-per-lead number can still hide wasted ad spend
The swarm of AI agents running Notion's ad operations
How he built an AI agent for LinkedIn dayparting, a feature the platform doesn't natively support
The creative duplication agent that saves a day of work every week
What he would do differently on his hackathon-winning project
How to decide what to automate first
Connect with Aaron:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-lu/
Notion: https://www.notion.com/
Connect with Profound:
Website: https://tryprofound.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tryprofound/
X: https://x.com/tryprofound
Read the Marketing Engineer Manifesto: https://www.tryprofound.com/marketing-engineer
Profound University: https://university.tryprofound.com/

The Marketing Engineer is a show for practitioners figuring out in real time what it means to market at the frontier. New episodes every two weeks.