Alex Sexton writes, on Smashing Magazine:

A front-end operations engineer would own external performance. They would be critical of new HTTP requests, and they would constantly be measuring file size and page-load time. They wouldn’t necessarily always worry about the number of times that a loop can run in a second — that’s still an application engineer’s job. They own everything past the functionality.
They are the bridge between an application’s intent and an application’s reality.

Yes! Web application frontends are getting so complicated, and so big, specializations like these are needed in companies.

Glad, Alex wrote this. I had been thinking along similar lines that past few months.