Mission
Engineering owns the load-bearing systems — the codebases, infrastructure, and tooling everything else hangs on. The team's job is to ship working software that scales, fails gracefully, and stays maintainable years from now.
How they work together
Engineering breaks into vertical specialties (frontend, backend, mobile, data, devops, security) and horizontal disciplines (architecture, code quality, testing, debugging, languages). The pattern: a senior generalist (e.g., backend-architect or systems-architect) sets the design contract, language specialists (e.g., typescript-pro, python-pro, rust-pro) implement, and review agents (architect-review, security-auditor, qa-test-engineer) close the loop before merge.
For incidents, the chain is incident-responder → error-detective / devops-troubleshooter → root-cause-analyzer → fix author. Don't skip the analyzer — it's the difference between a fix and a recurring fire.
Best practices
- Architecture before code. When a feature touches more than one service, route through backend-architect or systems-architect first. Sketch the contract, then build.
- Reviews are non-optional. Every PR worth merging gets an architect-review pass for structure and a security-auditor pass when it touches auth, data, or external boundaries.
- Test what you ship. test-automator or qa-test-engineer writes the integration test before the feature is called done. Unit-only coverage is a smell.
- Optimize after you measure. performance-tuner and performance-benchmarker work from profiles, not hunches. Don't index, cache, or rewrite until there's a number to beat.
Do's
- Use legacy-modernizer before rewriting. Most "rewrites" are migrations in disguise.
- Pull in graphql-architect the moment a REST API starts growing N+1 problems.
- Hand database changes to database-optimizer or database-admin — never wing a migration.
- Treat error-detective as a first-line responder for anything log-shaped.
Don'ts
- Don't ask a language specialist to design the system. Architects design; specialists implement.
- Don't skip security-auditor on auth, payments, or anything with a user upload field.
- Don't let devops-troubleshooter become the catch-all. Route to specialists once the symptom is identified.
Common tools
Read, Write, Edit, Bash, Grep, Glob — every engineering agent has these. Add Task for orchestrators (architects, reviewers) and WebFetch / WebSearch for agents that need external API context.
When to call on Engineering
Anything that runs in production. New services, broken services, slow services, services that need to talk to other services. If the answer involves a deploy, this is the team.