That sounds like the worst kind of tech position to be in

As a sort-of counterpoint I work at a non-amazon FANG where I am much more involved in model training and evaluation. I still have never needed to define a model myself, but it's much more complicated and far more ownership than someone throwing me a binary. I think that speaks much more to what's going on in Amazon *grins*.

It's about the same tier as BI dashboards. Huge breadths of data you don't produce but are nevertheless accountable for. All your stakeholders can easily stream-of-consciousness rattle off dozens of new metric/feature ideas or questions about the feature/metric values they're seeing over the course of 45 seconds, each one taking you tens of hours eyeballs deep in SQL to even begin to answer.

A job we would be glad to have replace by an AI for sure

Next up: why did the model say that? Which features contributed? Wouldn't it be cool if it also said... ? This other model responded slightly differently, can you take a look?

That is certainly coming soon.

This has been my experience as a data engineer.

ML guys build the fun stuff, go to conferences, etc. We maintain their stuff and work the 60 hour weeks answering pages.

It's mind numbing. Arguably some of the most boring work I've ever done especially knowing that you're just a CI/CD robot. Nothing has motivated me towards looking into starting a business more than watching other people have fun and you cleaning up their messes.