That was the true meaning of DevOps - fostering empathy and communication between different groups, and to stop the siloed "throw code over the wall to Ops" mentality that existed.
By having a "DevOp's Engineer" you have admitted you have failed at DevOps, because you have created a new silo.
A good team will have a combination of Operations Engineers, Software Engineers, Automation Engineers and Test Engineers all of whom work together, and collaborate on tooling, processes and deployments, who also share in the rewards for a projects success, and share in the responsibility for when something goes wrong.
DevOps is not a team created to "provide DevOps services to R&D" - which is the basic job description for far to many DevOps jobs postings.
It is also not just handy R&D pagers, and expecting them to manage a system.
Of course all of this is talking about the initial spirit of DevOps, not the current "Buy my Book", consultant driven mess that is now associated with the word.