[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.