Content engineer: because “blogging” wasn’t enterprise enough
“Content engineer” is what happens when the blog post gets a Jira ticket — and then a product owner.
It’s the role we invented when no one wanted to take accountability for the CMS, but everyone wanted to “scale content operations.” A Frankenstein job title, stitched together from dead roles like technical writer, content strategist, and frontend dev-who-regrets-volunteering. Except now it’s Agile. And API-first. And sounds just technical enough to justify a comp bump.
The suits love it. The vendors are already throwing webinars. But let’s not kid ourselves: this is just markdown with extra steps.
We were promised content velocity.
Instead, we got another title in drag.
The pitch sounds slick — engineer structured content systems that scale across channels, feed AI models, support localization, and adapt in real-time. But in practice? It’s still a desperate scramble to untangle 37 blog templates, align voice across 9 business units, and fix broken slugs that Marketing “accidentally” hardcoded into a campaign last quarter.
All while someone on the design team insists that the headings should be “editable but not really.”
What exactly is a content engineer?
Nobody knows. But job listings will pretend they do.
“You’ll architect modular narrative frameworks for omnichannel reuse.”
“Own and optimize the content pipeline to ensure delivery of programmatic thought leadership at scale.”
“Collaborate cross-functionally to implement dynamic content taxonomies in a composable architecture.”
If that sounds like someone fed a LinkedIn post into ChatGPT and told it to write a resume… you’re not wrong.
This isn’t a role. It’s a cry for help.
So who’s pushing for this job title?
Inside the org, it’s a familiar rogues’ gallery:
- The burned-out content strategist who’s tired of being left out of tooling discussions and sees “engineer” as a ladder to relevance (and maybe finally getting access to the CMS settings).
- The product manager who thinks labeling it “engineering” will let them budget for it under “platform work” instead of begging Brand for headcount.
- The senior UX writer trying to break out of microcopy jail, hoping this new title unlocks a seat at the architecture table.
- The dev rel lead who wants someone to “own the content pipeline” so they can go back to giving talks and shipping half-finished demo apps.
- The Director of Content Operations, who just wants dashboards, not drama.
Add them up and you’ve got a quorum. All are convinced that if they hire the right “content engineer,” the chaos will be solved.
Spoiler: it won’t.
Here’s what nobody’s admitting:
This title exists because the CMS is a mess — and nobody wants to own it.
Developers want out. Writers don’t want to learn Git. Marketing wants previews that don’t look like WordPress circa 2009. The CMS is too technical for content people, too content-heavy for engineers, and too brittle for scale. So we create a new persona. A new abstraction layer.
And then we pretend the system is working as intended.
“Act as a bridge between editorial intent and technical execution in a headless CMS environment.”
Translation: be the human middleware between people who don’t want to talk to each other.
Vendors, naturally, are thrilled.
This is their golden goose.
Headless CMS companies like Contentful, Sanity, and Storyblok have all but weaponized the term. Their sales decks now include org charts with “content engineer” sandwiched between “content designer” and “DX architect,” as if that isn’t just another way of saying “glorified integrator.”
The narrative? “You don’t need a better CMS, you need a content platform. And to run a platform? You need engineers.”
Translation: more seats, more complexity, more lock-in.
Some are worse than others. Uniform pitches orchestration so flexible it needs a full-time specialist just to map the config files. Hygraph calls itself “developer-first” while quietly repositioning toward “editor-friendly” — meaning someone’s still needed to glue it all together. Enter: the content engineer.
Even AI vendors are joining the party. Open-source LLM wrappers now include “structured content ingestion pipelines” in their fine print. Which sounds fancy — until you realize it means someone has to clean up all those rich text fields so the chatbot doesn’t hallucinate legal disclaimers in blog intros.
Guess whose job that becomes?
“Ensure seamless integration of structured content into generative AI workflows.”
Oh good. Now the blog post has a machine learning dependency.
We’ve DevOps’d ourselves into narrative debt.
Just like DevOps tried to break silos and accidentally created new ones (see: DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, SRE Theater™), content engineering risks the same fate. What starts as a noble effort to unify the story across systems quickly devolves into a game of schema whack-a-mole.
Every new field is a negotiation. Every new channel is a fork. Every localization sprint becomes a guilt trip.
And the “content engineer”? They’re stuck in the middle — expected to model, orchestrate, and maintain… without ever being allowed to ask why we’re publishing 200 SEO articles about Kubernetes migration readiness.
The job is real. The clarity isn’t.
People are doing hard, valuable, technical content work — especially in DevRel-heavy orgs, regulated industries, or companies with deeply fragmented content stacks. But calling that role “content engineer” doesn’t magically clarify it.
Right now, the title is a Rorschach test for dysfunction.
To the CMO, it’s a strategist with Git access.
To the CTO, it’s someone who won’t break the build.
To the AI team, it’s a token human-in-the-loop.
To the platform vendor? It’s the person who signs the renewal.
And to the poor soul in the role?
It’s being the last line of defense between a broken WYSIWYG editor and the homepage.
“Own the end-to-end lifecycle of content modeling, component authoring, asset routing, and editorial experience design.”
That’s not a job. That’s a department. And a therapy bill.
Until we fix the incentives, we’re just renaming the mess.
You don’t need a “content engineer” to solve your publishing pain. You need:
- A clear owner of the content model (not five stakeholders with Google Docs opinions).
- A CMS that supports iteration without 3-week dev cycles.
- Writers who aren’t treated like downstream service providers.
- Engineers who stop pretending content is “just another asset.”
Do that, and maybe — maybe — you’ll find someone who can straddle both worlds. Someone who can code and care about clarity. Who sees information as infrastructure, not noise.
But don’t let the title do the work for you.
Because the moment we start hiring for “narrative infrastructure engineers,” it’s all over.
Final thought:
The content isn’t broken. The culture is. Stop engineering around dysfunction. Start funding the people who already know how to fix it.
And maybe — just maybe — stop calling every glue job a “platform.”
