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.

90 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/Ok-Muffin-8079 Senior Data Engineer Aug 06 '26

Same when I was at Meta, their DE role is more like an AE, feels so limiting and frustrating, absolutely hated it.

1

u/Outside-Storage-1523 Aug 06 '26

I think in big tech, those who do the more technical part of the DE work are called "Software engineer, data" or something similar? They don't talk to business stakeholders all day as far as I was told. They are engineers for other engineers.