Home The 61 Specialists & 8 Departments Engineering: roles and what it does

Engineering: roles and what it does

Last updated on May 30, 2026

Code that ships clean. Reviews that catch the right things. CI green on main.

The team (head: CTO / Engineering Lead)

  • CTO / Engineering Lead
  • Backend & API Engineer
  • Codex Engineer
  • Data & AI Engineer
  • DevOps / SRE
  • Frontend Engineer
  • Hermes Agent OS Specialist
  • QA
  • Reviewer
  • Test Automation Engineer

What this department actually does

  • Owns architecture and the hard calls. Technical strategy set, every architectural decision recorded, build-vs-buy decided with reasons. Quality enforced on the way in.
  • Builds and reviews the work. Backend services, APIs, and UI built against contracts and a component library. Every PR reviewed so quality, performance, and security do not drift.
  • Keeps the lights on. Deployment, monitoring, and on-call owned. A runbook and a post-mortem library that turn incidents into fixes instead of repeats.
  • Tunes cost and reliability. The agent runtime and orchestration graph optimized for cost and latency, the data and inference layer tuned per workload so the bill tracks the value.

Example missions in your own words

You do not assign these tasks by hand. You type one sentence and the department scopes it. A few realistic examples:

  • "Our site is slow. Put it on a performance budget and hold the line."
    Initial JS pulled under budget, layout shift measured, the slow paths fixed. A Lighthouse check wired into CI so it does not regress next week.
  • "PRs are sitting for days. Get the review queue moving."
    Every open PR reviewed against quality, performance, and security bars within a day. Nothing rots silently waiting on a human.
  • "We keep shipping regressions. Build the test coverage."
    Automated tests across the critical paths, flake driven down, CI kept green and fast so a broken build means something is actually broken.
  • "Document the architecture so a new engineer can ramp in a day."
    Architecture decision records written, the runbook updated, the orchestration graph documented. The system stops living only in one person's head.

Every artifact this department produces runs through the four-step review (builder, QA, reviewer, security) before it reaches you, and any risky move waits at one of the five approval points.