[ddol]

I had a similar experience at Airbnb.

My title at Airbnb was “Data Engineer” in 2016, then “Software Engineer - Data” 2016-2019, then just “Software Engineer” 2019-2023.

When I joined the DE team we were not in the Engineering Org, our manager reported to the head of Analytics (Chief Data Scientist). The DE perf cycle, job levels and comp were all tied to the Analytics Org levels. There was a Data Infra team (DI) under Engineering > Infrastructure who managed Presto, HBase, HIVE, &c. but didn’t touch pipelines, that was DE’s job.

Most of the DE’s owned more than pipelines though, many of us also wrote and owned services. Max on our team built Airflow and Caravel/Panoramix/Superset during hackathons, Johnathan built our Data Quality tool, Amit built the Minerva semantic metrics layer (which Nick, James and Paul spun out as Transform), Aaron built our Anomaly Detection platform, John built Dataportal, I built our Customer Support Roster service and a Kafka indexing service.

Our manager was awesome. She saw that we were undervalued in Analytics and lobbied successfully to move the team to the Engineering Infrastructure org. We were all retitled in Workday, our perf structure changed to align with the rest of Engineering, as did our levels.

DE living as a whole org team under Infra lasted less than a year before we were split up and distributed into the respective product teams we supported, as Software Engineers with a focus on building & maintaining pipelines, schemas, logging libraries… and the existing tools we had built. The intention was to be embedded into the product teams (Homes, Trips, Support Tools, &c.), skill up these teammates and share the oncall load. In reality what happened was that (at least) 3 DE teams then grew in the various product orgs.

[gigatexal]

Maybe this is different at the highest levels of the game but for the engineers in the more mainstream parts of the bell curve at the less than Google level of craziness and volume companies Data Engineers -- folks that have come up as former DBAs, DataWarehouse devs, db heavy backend devs, analytics / reporting folks -- it's been my experience that these folks tend to solve problems in a more straight forward, data centric, practical sort of way. And in my experience folks who enter a data role from the sofware side of things tend to come up with rather convoluted solutions to simple things.

Therefore I think the title distinction is warranted. It frames that the company is looking for engineers with skills in the software space -- source control mastery, knowledge of a language or two other than SQL, but also experience looking at query plans, designing large scale data systems, dealing with BI tools etc etc. A sw engineer from a traditional background CAN do this but I'd rather someone that fits the DE role more.