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by teraflop 1296 days ago
Generally speaking:

"Data engineering" means building systems that can manipulate data (e.g. storing, retrieving, and delivering it). There are usually fairly well-defined functional requirements about what the system is supposed to do, plus goals about performance and reliability that might be slightly more nebulous.

"Data science" means building systems that can draw conclusions from data. The functional requirement is usually some form of "accuracy", as measured somehow against some kind of human evaluation of the same conclusion.

Concretely: a data engineer might be asked to build a system that can ingest every tweet posted to Twitter, and return the 10 most widely-used hashtags in the last hour. A data scientist might be asked to build a system that looks at a tweet and figures out what language it's written in, or whether it's spam, or whether an attached image is pornographic.