What do we even mean by "AI engineer" these days? Are you an AI engineer if you spend months on end writing complex langchains, building datasets, evaluating them, and deploying them to prod? What if you did all that without having any background in "legit" ML, does that matter?

I think that part is still a bit ambiguous, it's almost how people and companies self-identify the role. But that said, we collect a bit of a taxonomy for our role structure, and we specifically look at Software Engineers focused on AI. The responsibilities can still differ from company to company, but that's what we used for our dataset.