[smeeth]

I'd be best described as an ML Researcher/Engineer and I'm not in the private sector so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that many DS roles require application of the scientific method.

A lot of DS can be boiled down to some sort of statistical testing or inference (A/B test email marketing for example) or applied ml (classification, regression). I'd argue thats science (if done right).

Data Analysis, the plot a few charts and put it in a slide deck kind? Totally agree with you. Definitely not science.