[eanzenberg]

I guess I'm in the minority in these threads..? I've been doing machine learning / model-building / pushing models to prod and maintaining for about 6 years now. It's still 50/50 understanding the data and building/tweaking/training/testing models. But it sounds like most people with this title are analysts? At least that's what posts and threads lead me to believe. I've also met a lot of people with titles like "ML Engineer" or "Data Scientist" who don't do machine learning. They are analysts, engineers, or maintaining data pipelines.

[proverbialbunny]

Pushing models to prod is often MLE work depending on the organization, though MLE is often slang like how dev is slang. MLE an be a job title just as Developer can be a job title, but more common than not the job title is Machine Learning Software Engineer, or just Software Engineer for short.

I suspect a lot of people want the sexy Data Science job title, which is why there has been such a push for it, and why most new "data scientists" take the title but do Data Engineer / Infrastructure Software Engineer work or MLE work instead.

I think MLE is more sexy in a lot of ways, and it often pays better than DS work, so it's odd that many haven't flocked to that job title, but maybe the whole software engineer part turns people off for some sort of reason.

Me, I'm more a classic data scientist / research engineer, which involves a lot of digging through data and research and generalized learning, then presenting my findings. I'm not using any ML on the job right now, but often I have in the past. It's just a tool, not an end.