The Narrative Engineer

Every era of tech creates new roles that didn't exist before. The companies that hire them first win. The rest play catch-up.

In the late 2000s, it was the "growth hacker," someone who understood virality mechanics and could turn product into distribution (think A/B tests, referral loops). In the early 2010s, it was the "data scientist," someone who could turn messy datasets into infrastructure for decision-making. By the late 2010s, it was the "machine learning engineer," building AI into products before most companies knew what to do with it. Around 2019, Palantir popularized the "forward deployed engineer", technical consultants who embed directly (aka are “deployed”) with clients to create custom solutions and sticky enterprise contracts. More recently, Clay coined the "go-to-market engineer" to describe people architecting and automating the systems (think APIs, workflows, data flows) that power go-to-market execution.

I'm watching a new archetype emerge on founding teams. And companies that don't have it are scrambling to hire for it retroactively.

The narrative engineer.

🎯 Defining the Role 

This isn't a head of comms brought in at Series B. This isn't a content creator who dabbles in startups. This is a founder who treats attention like infrastructure.

Software engineers optimize code so the app loads instantly.
Narrative engineers optimize comprehension so the value prop loads instantly.

There's been a lot of conversation lately about companies needing "storytellers," and most of it gets dismissed as just rebranding the head of comms. That misses what's actually happening. The best companies don't hire storytellers after the fact. They're founded by people who engineer the conditions for belief to compound.

👀 What This Looks Like

Notion brought on Jackson Dahl and his podcast Dialectic. Not because they needed another marketing channel, but because Jackson and his guests represent a certain kind of builder Notion wants to be associated with. That's narrative engineering: choosing which conversations your brand lives inside of, which people you want to be synonymous with, which ideas get attached to your name. They also created a Chief Communications and Creative Officer role reporting directly to the CEO (a structural signal that narrative isn't a downstream function).

The Browser Company built Arc into a cultural phenomenon before they had meaningful revenue. They have a "head of storytelling" advising the CEO. They launched a TV series about their product roadmap. They shared board meetings publicly. Their release notes are short films.

The result? Viral growth, millions of users, and a $610 million all-cash acquisition by Atlassian in September 2025. Here's what's interesting: the deal "is not expected to have a material impact on financials" for Atlassian. So what were they buying? One analyst put it bluntly: "Design chops. Video-making chops. Founder energy." They bought narrative engineering capability that Atlassian couldn't build internally. That's how valuable this function has become.

Linear is narrative engineering through product philosophy. Karri Saarinen didn't just build project management software. He built a belief system.

Their launch video wasn't a product demo. It was a mood. Dark interfaces, precise animations, zero voiceover. It felt like an architecture firm announcing a building, not a startup hawking software. People shared it because it meant something about who they were. No mascot, no confetti, no "fun." Everything says: this tool is for people who take their craft seriously.

The result? A $400M+ valuation with a cult following and only $35k in lifetime marketing spend. That's what happens when the narrative is baked into the product itself. You stop paying to explain. People just know.

🧬 Why It Has to Be a Founder 

Here's where I'll be direct: the narrative engineer needs to be a co-founder, not a hire. You can (and should) hire narrative engineers to amplify and execute. But the best companies have this skillset on the founding team from day one.

Duolingo illustrates this well. In 2021, a 23-year-old named Zaria Parvez asked if she could make videos for their dormant TikTok. Four years later, she'd scaled it from 50k to 16 million followers and turned Duo the Owl into a cultural character people genuinely care about.

Zaria was a 10x narrative engineer. But she was amplifying something the founders had already built. The quirky, chaotic brand voice existed before her. The Pittsburgh HQ, the public culture handbook, the willingness to be weird. Those were founder decisions. Luis von Ahn built a company where someone like Zaria could thrive, where her instincts would be celebrated rather than managed into blandness. That's the infrastructure.

When Zaria left in 2025, Duolingo didn't collapse. The narrative architecture wasn't dependent on one person's TikTok intuition. It was baked into how the company thinks.

Just like a 10x engineer who knows the codebase intimately, or a 10x GTM engineer who understands how every revops system connects, a 10x narrative engineer has a pulse on brand voice that can't easily be replicated. The companies that do this best (Linear, Notion, Browser Company, etc) have it baked into the founding team's DNA. It's not a department. It's how the company thinks.

Companies that hire for narrative without founder-level conviction end up with content calendars. Companies where it's in the founding DNA end up with movements.

🗃️ Typology of Engineers

⚙️ Why “Engineer”? 

There's a reason these roles all use "engineer" in the title. The word carries weight in tech. It signals rigor, systems thinking, something technical rather than soft.

This says something uncomfortable about our industry. We add "engineer" to titles because we respect engineers, and that respect correlates with who gets funded. The archetype VC loves is still the technical, young, heads-down coder. The young Zuck type.

But many of the companies winning right now have a different archetype on their founding teams: someone who thinks about distribution and positioning as a craft, who treats attention with the same seriousness technical founders treat code. The “narrative engineer” title works because the best people in this role do engineer things. They build systems for distribution. They architect how language spreads through a market. They design the conditions for belief to compound.

⏰ Why Now

Software used to be the moat. If you could build it, you had an advantage.

That's compressing. Infrastructure is cheap. AI writes code. Spinning up a product is table stakes.

What you can't automate is the story that makes someone care. The language that makes your category feel inevitable. The positioning that makes competitors look like they're playing a different game. The kind of customer love where people tell their friends not because you asked, but because they can't believe everyone isn't already using this.

🎲 The Bet

Venture loves the technical founder. That archetype has made a lot of people a lot of money. But we think the playbook is shifting.

We're betting the next generation of winners will have a narrative engineer on the founding team from the start. Not hired at Series B. Someone who's already proven they can build an audience, shape a conversation, make people care about something before it exists. 

If that's you, we want to hear from you ([email protected]).

The companies that figure this out first win. The rest will blame the algorithm.

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