The disciplines we work across.
Each guide explains what the role actually does, the situations that create a need for it, and what to look for when you are assessing someone. Written for the person deciding whether they need the role at all.
These are guides to the disciplines, not a list of engineers waiting. What we can support for your team depends on the requirement — tell us what the roadmap needs and we will tell you honestly what we can do.
Software Engineering
Frontend developers
A frontend developer builds the interface layer of a web or mobile application — the screens, interactions and data-fetching that run in the user’s browser or device.
Backend developers
A backend developer builds and operates the server-side of an application: the data model, the APIs other systems call, the business rules that must hold every time, the asynchronous and scheduled work that happens away from a user request, and the authorisation that decides who may see what.
Full-stack developers
A full-stack developer builds complete features across both the server and the interface: the schema change, the queries, the API or server action, the screens that consume it, and the tests and deployment that put it in front of users.
Mobile developers
A mobile developer builds and releases applications for iOS, Android or both — the screens and navigation, the local data storage that lets the app work without a connection, the integration with device capabilities such as camera, location, biometrics and notifications, and the release process that carries a build through store review and out to users.
AI & Data
AI engineers
An AI engineer builds software products whose behaviour depends on a foundation model — usually a large language model reached through a provider API or run as a hosted open-weight model.
Machine learning engineers
A machine learning engineer builds, trains, deploys and maintains predictive models in production.
Data engineers
A data engineer builds and operates the systems that carry data from where it is created to where it is used.
Data scientists
A data scientist answers questions with data.
Cloud & Platform
DevOps engineers
A DevOps engineer builds and maintains the automation that carries software from a developer’s commit into a running production system, along with the feedback that tells the team what happened afterwards.
Cloud engineers
A cloud engineer designs, builds and operates the infrastructure a system runs on inside a cloud provider: the account and network topology, the identity and permission model, the choice between managed services and self-hosted components, the arrangements that keep the system available when a zone or region fails, and the spending all of it generates.
Platform engineers
A platform engineer builds and runs an internal developer platform: a self-service surface through which an organisation’s engineers create services, deploy them, obtain infrastructure, observe what they run and operate it, without needing to understand or assemble the underlying components themselves.
Quality
QA engineers
A QA engineer works out how a software product can fail and makes sure the team learns about those failures before its users do.
Test automation engineers
A test automation engineer designs, builds and maintains the software that tests a product automatically.
Leadership & Delivery
Tech leads
A tech lead is the engineer accountable for the technical direction of a single team’s work.
Software architects
A software architect decides how a set of systems is structured and how that structure evolves.
Engineering managers
An engineering manager is accountable for the functioning of an engineering team: who is in it, how they develop, how they perform, how they work together, and whether the team delivers dependably.
Project managers
A project manager owns the delivery of a defined body of work: agreeing its scope and sequence, mapping the dependencies between teams and suppliers, tracking timeline and budget against the plan, surfacing risk while it can still be acted on, clearing obstacles that the delivery team cannot clear alone, and keeping stakeholders informed with a picture they can act on.
Business analysts
A business analyst investigates a business problem and defines what a system must do to solve it.
Not sure which discipline you need?
That is a common and reasonable place to start. Describe the work and the gap, and we will help you scope it — including telling you when the answer is a role we cannot help with.