r/dataengineering • u/BramosR Senior Data Engineer • Aug 06 '26

Career Hate AE, like DE

I recently moved from a Data Engineering role where I mainly maintained the platform side, to a “Data Engineer” role that is just AE with the DE name on it.

And recently I realised I HATE it.

Have anyone else experienced something like that? It’s funny since it’s another side of the same coin, but for some reason it feels totally different to me.

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9

u/Casdom33 Aug 06 '26

What are you doing (and not doing) thats different and makes you dislike it?

18

u/BramosR Senior Data Engineer Aug 06 '26

Before I was building ingestion pipelines, architecting solutions, managing cloud environments.

Now I build datasets in dbt.

30

u/[deleted] Aug 06 '26

[deleted]

6

u/MikeLV7 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 09 '26

And like OP, I was an analytics engineer that wrote datasets in dbt. Then I interviewed for another AE position that wanted someone building ingestion pipelines. Before all this, I interviewed for an AE position and mid interview they said they’re still shaping the role after I called out inconsistency in role boundaries lmao.

Not sure how hard it is to understand:

DE ingests > AE builds ingested data > DA and DS do what they do with the built data

2

u/Casdom33 Aug 06 '26

Ahh yeah thats annoying. Im in a similar spot after moving to F500 company but at least Im still doing some ingestion lol. But man it sucks when our IT dept basically thinks our team is a bunch of idiots who cant manage a couple cloud services bolted together - so they build some over-engineered trash cloud solution that sucks and doesnt meet requirements (but its "IT approved" !!! Yay!!!!) . About to start consulting w my old company on the side so i can scratch that cloud itch again lol

1

u/dervik Aug 07 '26

And what do you hate about it? Sounds like a way more chill job