Team: Building the Modern Content Engineering Organization
Your content org was built for a slower, simpler business, and the volume you need to produce now has outpaced what that structure can handle. Lucy Hoyle, Senior Content Engineer at Carta, shows you how she redesigned her team's roles and processes to keep up with that demand and stay ahead of it.
What You'll Learn
Most content teams were built for a different era. At Carta, Lucy Hoyle's team followed a familiar setup: writers handled research and drafting while editors set strategy and SEO specialists optimized for organic search. Brand and creative teams handled visuals, and legal reviewed everything before publication (critical in a regulated industry like private capital).
This worked when Carta had one product and one audience segment. But as the company expanded into fund administration, private credit, and other areas of private capital, the manual workflow became unscalable. Content crawled through hand-offs and endless rework. AirOps helped Carta rethink this model from the ground up.
At the same time, SEO was becoming AEO (answer engine optimization). Content teams had to optimize for large language models (LLMs) and human readers. The volume of specific, original content required to win across traditional organic search and AI engines outpaced what any editorial team could produce manually. Your audience's expectations grew 10x while your team stayed the same size.
Five dimensions of change
Lucy frames the transformation around five dimensions your team needs to rethink.
- Team. How roles are structured and who owns what.
- Metrics. How you measure success in a Content Engineering model.
- Skill set. What capabilities you hire and develop for.
- Process. How work flows through your content pipeline.
- Mindset. How your team approaches experimentation and innovation.
From manual workflows to a content engine
On the process side, Carta started by creating AI-driven workflows to speed up production. The bigger unlock was connecting those manual work streams into an interconnected content engine built and run in AirOps. Every new piece of content could draw from brand guidelines, product messaging, existing articles, performance metrics, proprietary data, and internal expertise. Once the infrastructure was designed and tested, the team could generate on-brand, high-quality articles at the click of a button.
On the mindset side, the barrier to entry for building with AI tooling is lower than ever. At Carta, everyone now uses AI in their daily work. Lucy credits AirOps' first Content Engineering cohort (May 2025) with changing the trajectory of her career. Her advice: treat AI as an enabler. It makes everything you're already good at go further.
What a Content Engineer does day to day
As a Content Engineer, every day looks different. Lucy might start the week tweaking brand content inputs and testing new agents. By Friday, she's architecting a workflow to feed competitor intelligence into middle-of-funnel content. The role is orchestration. You design new systems and produce unique content at a pace no manual team could match, all without sacrificing quality.
The best Content Engineers share one thing. They honed their craft before using AI. Whether they came from writing or SEO, they worked in the space long enough to know what good content looks like. Once you have a strong idea of the output you want, building the systems to produce it becomes much easier.
The four functions of a modern content organization
Lucy outlines four functions that make up a modern content organization. Each has a clear mandate and a dedicated owner.
Context management
This function powers the content engine. Your context manager owns editorial standards and governance. They ensure that all information about your brand (style, tone of voice, audience messaging, product positioning) feeds into the system at the right moments to enrich your content. If this function is weak, you'll get output that's technically correct but could have been written by any company. Everything else in the system relies on the source of brand truth this role maintains.
Systems engineering
This is where individual steps become streamlined workflows. Your Content Engineer handles system design, agent orchestration, quality control, and iteration based on feedback. Strong engineers map connections between multiple workflows and stay close enough to the output to catch what the system misses before it ships. Lucy's role at Carta straddles both context management and systems engineering. She leans on the experts around her to shape the infrastructure that allows them to scale.
Content strategy
Your strategist operates at a higher level, working cross-functionally to align content with wider business needs. They also define the roadmap based on performance signals. Without this function, you're generating output but not learning from impact. This data component creates a stronger feedback loop. At Carta, this function is made up of the Director of SEO/AEO and senior editors.
Executive sponsorship
This goes well beyond budget approval. Content Engineering crosses team boundaries by design. You need a C-suite champion who can clear roadblocks and make sure the entire leadership team understands the importance of AI search visibility. Carta's CMO, Nicole, serves as a strong executive sponsor.
Scaling the model to fit your team
The four-function model adapts to any team size.
- Large company. You might have multiple Content Engineering teams dedicated to different product lines, business units, or content types. Or you could have one team with two or three people operating in each function.
- Small company. One person might wear all four hats. They'd start by owning the tools and designing the system, then split responsibilities and specialize as the team grows.
No matter how big your content team gets, the feedback loop needs to stay intact for the system to evolve and scale successfully.
Where to start
The best investment you can make right now is in yourself. The people who upskill into Content Engineering today will be the ones leading their own teams tomorrow.
Lucy's advice: get stuck in and don't wait for perfection. If you're wondering how to secure executive buy-in, start by helping your leaders understand the cost of inaction.
Key takeaways
- Sell the cost of doing nothingWhen pitching Content Engineering to your executive team, skip the feature list. Lucy recommends asking one question: "What is your company losing every month by not prioritizing the content engine?" That reframe turns a nice-to-have into an urgent business problem.
- Invest in people before platformsCarta's CMO Nicole funded the Content Engineering transformation by investing in her team's skills first, not buying more tools. The technology only worked because the people behind it understood brand voice and editorial standards deeply enough to build systems worth scaling.
- Give your team a safe space to break thingsAt Carta, everyone now uses AI in daily work. That adoption happened because leadership created a culture where experimentation and failure were expected, not penalized. You can't build a Content Engineering org if people are afraid to test new approaches.
- One cohort changed Lucy's entire career pathLucy credits AirOps' first Content Engineering cohort in May 2025 with shifting her trajectory from traditional content roles into Content Engineering. The barrier to building with AI is lower than you think. The people who upskill now will lead their own teams next.
FAQs
A Content Engineer designs and optimizes content systems using AI and automation. At companies like Carta, the role spans context management and systems engineering, connecting brand guidelines and performance data into workflows that produce on-brand content at scale. The strongest Content Engineers built deep editorial foundations before adopting AI, giving them the judgment to guide automated systems toward quality output. AirOps provides the platform where Content Engineers build and orchestrate these systems.
Resources
- The 10x Content EngineerArticle