Are game programmers allowed to request certain features from engine

We typically won't request others to do work without reason. If the gameplay programmer needs some kind of engine function to do her own work, then yeah - she's totally allowed (and expected) to request new features from the engine team. For small tasks and/or small dev teams, this might just be a direct request that gets fielded quickly. For tasks of larger scope, the gameplay team sends the request and some technical decision-maker (usually the tech lead or tech director) will make the call as to whether the requested feature is necessary or not. If it is deemed needed, time on the engine team's schedule will get carved out to address the task. If not, the gameplay team must make do with what they've got.

This situation actually happened to me fairly recently - I am working on a particular task and it turned out that I may need support from the engine team to make a fairly sizable change to the way one of our major systems is currently working in order to build the kind of feature that the creative director wants. I've had to explain the full scope of what we need to the tech director so that he has the context to make the appropriate call. At the moment I'm using some hacky and temporary workarounds for the prototype, but that's expected - we don't need the full feature until we ship, so having a less performant but functioning prototype is enough to prove out the design and buy us the time to make the bigger engine change.

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