Profound launched the first-ever Marketing Engineering Hackathon with $40,000 in prizes on June 6th in Union Square, NYC. The event limits 50 builders to one day of building marketing agents for judges from Ramp, Stripe, and MongoDB.
Key facts
- $40,000 total prize pool
- 50 builders, one day, June 6th
- Union Square, New York City
- Judges from Ramp, Stripe, MongoDB
- Platform agnostic: Claude Code, Cursor, n8n, Python, LangChain
The one-day event, announced by Profound on X, challenges participants to "find a marketing process that's inhuman in scope or scale" and build a system or agent that runs it. With only 50 spots available via application, the hackathon targets two groups: technical marketers with GitHub histories who have been building agents, and engineers with marketing instinct who see broken marketing systems.
Platform Agnostic Design
Unlike most vendor-sponsored hackathons, Profound is not requiring exclusive use of its platform. [According to @hasantoxr] the event is "fully platform agnostic" — everyone gets Profound access but can also build with Claude Code, Cursor, n8n, Python, LangChain, or raw API calls. The rule: "whatever ships the best system wins."
Prize Structure
Two prize categories exist with identical payouts: Best Overall Build ($10K cash + $10K Profound agent credits + interview at Profound) and Best Profound-Native Agent (same structure). The judges are from Ramp, Stripe, and MongoDB — companies actively hiring for marketing engineering roles.
Unique Take
The hackathon's significance isn't the prize money or the venue. It's that Profound is betting marketing engineering will become a recognized discipline, and wants to write its playbook before anyone else does. The company introduced the term "Marketing Engineering" weeks ago. By hosting a platform-agnostic event judged by potential employers, Profound is essentially creating the market for the role its platform serves — a structural play that mirrors how early cloud companies sponsored developer conferences to legitimize cloud engineering.
Who This Affects
Technical marketers and engineer-marketers who have been building agents in the shadows. The hackathon offers direct access to hiring managers at companies that already recognize the role. For Profound, it's a recruiting funnel disguised as a competition.
What to watch
Watch for the quality of submissions and whether any winning agents go viral or get acquired by the judging companies. If Profound announces a second hackathon or a formal marketing engineering certification program within 90 days, the bet on the discipline is real.
