After the positive responses to my recent post in Towards Data Science about Machine Learning Engineers, I thought I would write a bit about what I think are the real categories of roles for data science practitioners in the job market. While I was previously talking about the candidates, e.g. what their qualification expectations and realities might be, today I want to talk about what the actual job is day to day.
That is to say, these are what I think people actually are hiring data science professionals to do, whether they admit it or not. I am going to explain what the job really does, as opposed to what the claims might be in the job description, and where in a business org chart (roughly) you might be located.