I believe that falls under what the OP called engineering, which is fair as in engineering one often has to run experiments to determine if what one thinks will work in the particular case actually works.

No, it's a whole scientific field, with experiments, lit review, publications, peer review and everything.

The engineering artifact is just a by-product. More often than not, the code is thrown away or never used again, once the experiments have been run and the paper has been published.

The distinction between engineering and science gets pretty blurred at the boundaries.