I'm thinking things like: do you know what's the latency and throughput of your system, and how it is affected by different conditions? Based on this, people who work on real-time systems (including video games) would be the closest thing to the engineers of the software world.

Right, but then it's A/B cog-sci, which I think is no longer science, but practice completely under software, and in a sense, practice that's no longer science, but behavioral modification.