[ilovetux]

I believe that a Refactoring Engineer would be similar to a contractor specializing in performance, security or systems optimization. I've had the pleasure of working with a couple of these people, and I have to say that I felt an initial (pride|arrogance)-based resistance but they were all friendly and had some really valuable insights especially since their expertise seemed to be lower-level than mine and they were able to look at working code and find places to improve.

In essence I agree with you that this should be an on-staff role, but perhaps the reason we are not seeing this is that the job is usually fairly quick (a couple of weeks/months) and for the business its hard to justify a full-time staff member to perform this service. There is also something to be said for how people in this role are able to gather a wealth of experience by working on a high number of code bases instead of being stuck continuously working on the same few software projects all year.