> I was shocked to learn that my new employer has a very different job definition for ML Engineer than the one I was familiar with.
Job titles do not have consistent meaning across regions or industries. People use buzzwords and hype to recruit funding and talent.
You've learned an important lesson: use interviews to gather information about companies and teams. "Can you describe in broad strokes a typical project for this role?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a hiring manager.
I was an ML engineer, and to me it was far more about data management/cleaning than nitty gritty algorithms improvements, but that's definitely not industry standard.
I've also found "Product Engineer" job listings to range from essentially just a backend engineer to a product designer who codes.
This. I would add that role titles also exist for negotiation purposes. For example, a new employee may prefer to be called "research engineer" instead of "ML DevOps" to open up future career opportunities, even if the work done is the same.
Job titles do not have consistent meaning across regions or industries. People use buzzwords and hype to recruit funding and talent.
You've learned an important lesson: use interviews to gather information about companies and teams. "Can you describe in broad strokes a typical project for this role?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a hiring manager.