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(2017) Rise of the Data Engineer
(medium.com)
A community for discussion about data engineering
Icon base by Delapouite under CC BY 3.0 with modifications to add a gradient
That seems like a good idea by removing ambiguity about what the necessary skills are.
When joining a new company, I once asked a wise colleague “are you a data engineer or a backend engineer?”. They replied “I’m a software engineer” and ever since I have given the same answer, for reasons similar to your post.
I have also seen “data engineer” used at facebook to indicate someone who writes SQL but not other programming languages, another potential reason not to use this as a job title IMO.