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Re:Ask HN: What does an ML Engineer do? by sohei on Friday June 18, 2021 @06:51PM (#27555880)
> 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.

Re:Ask HN: What does an ML Engineer do? by alex_g on Friday June 18, 2021 @07:07PM (#27555995)
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.

Re:Ask HN: What does an ML Engineer do? by WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 on Friday June 18, 2021 @09:45PM (#27557008)
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.