As a data scientist, I agree with this. On my team, the data scientists with the largest impact seem to be the ones who are sort of hybrid software engineers / data scientists. I’ve noticed these people tend to swap between the two titles occasionally (re-interviewing within the company for one role or the other).

I think if I had my own company I’d create a position like “scientific software engineer”, which would basically be a SWE with a scientific or statistical background. It would de-emphasize pure analysis in favor of directly applied research in the form of production code. There are some similar titles out there (research scientist, ML engineer), but they don’t quite capture exactly what I have in mind. “Applied scientist” would probably be the closest.