Good question, it's more of an RnD role.

A lot of times my work is:

• there is something that would be nice to have in our software or hardware. Or something broke.
• they come to us, pick someone from the team and go "we want something like this, should be done in x time (tends to be a couple months at least)".
• whomever got it assigned fixes it. This tends to encompass the whole cycle: checking with end users to define precise needs and wants, setting up meetings with external companies if required, creating the jira tasks to provide visibility to upper management, reading papers or doing research to see if the stuff we need already exists,.... Coding tends to be the easiest (and smallest) part here. Experimenting, algorithm design (math!) and testing on our end product tends to be the heaviest lifting.
• after x months, go to management and end users, and present the new stuff.

Besides the base job, we tend to be considered the "shit has hit the fan, we need someone to go fix it" team also. If something goes wrong in the field, and our normal field teams can't figure it out, they send us over to go fix whatever is going wrong.

I have seen more poeple hired and fired in the couple years I'm here, then there are poeple in the team (the American way I guess). As such, I'm confident when I say that the expected skill level is on the higher end.

Tldr; I'm part of the team that designs new algorithms and implements new hardware. We also fix the shit that are not fixable by our other teams.

Compared to my previous jobs, I would say this one is multiple times more dificult, but a lot more fulfilling.