Who runs an agent company: the marketing engineer

The org chart question we get most often: who actually operates this? Not the CTO. Not an "AI team". In every deployment that stuck, it was one person sitting between the domain and the system — we call the role the marketing engineer, though the pattern repeats in sales and ops.

What the role does

In this walkthrough we follow one week of the role inside our own company:

• Monday: review the weekend's closed-agent runs. Three eval failures escalated — two stale price entries in the brain, one genuinely ambiguous case. Fix the brain entries (four minutes), answer the ambiguous one, both flow back into memory.
• Tuesday: a campaign brief arrives. Open-agent session: the brief becomes a structured task, the orchestrator fans it out to the copy, landing-page and reporting agents. The human edits the angle, not the sentences.
• Wednesday: prompt maintenance. The outreach agent's reply rate dipped; the transcripts show it over-explaining. One constraint added to its system prompt, A/B scheduled against the old version.
• Thursday: a new check is added to the eval suite after a near-miss — a draft quoted a competitor's discontinued product. Twenty minutes, never happens again.
• Friday: the weekly numbers agent reports on the other agents. Pass rates, escalations, cost per task. The human reads one page, not nine dashboards.

What the role is not

It is not prompt-whispering all day, and it is not classical campaign work. The craft is systems editing: noticing patterns in agent output and fixing the system — brain, prompts, checks — instead of fixing instances. One layer up from the work.

The hiring profile, counterintuitively: strong operators with editorial judgment learn the technical layer in weeks. The reverse path is slower.