[sohei]

> I was shocked to learn that my new employer has a very different job definition for ML Engineer than the one I was familiar with.

Job titles do not have consistent meaning across regions or industries. People use buzzwords and hype to recruit funding and talent.

You've learned an important lesson: use interviews to gather information about companies and teams. "Can you describe in broad strokes a typical project for this role?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a hiring manager.

[alex_g]

This 1000%.

I was an ML engineer, and to me it was far more about data management/cleaning than nitty gritty algorithms improvements, but that's definitely not industry standard.

I've also found "Product Engineer" job listings to range from essentially just a backend engineer to a product designer who codes.

[WnZ39p0Dgydaz1]

This. I would add that role titles also exist for negotiation purposes. For example, a new employee may prefer to be called "research engineer" instead of "ML DevOps" to open up future career opportunities, even if the work done is the same.