Well my understanding is that a Data Engineer is basically just a DevOps engineer but instead of building infra to run applications they build infra to process, sanitize and normalize data.
Author here - Of course, data engineering involves building infra and being knowledgeable about DevOps practices, but that’s not the only area data engineers should be familiar with. There are many, many more! In my personal experience, sometimes we end up not using DevOps best practices because we spread too thin. That’s why I believe in specialization within data engineering and the surge of “data reliability engineer” or similar
Imho that is absolutely not doing the role justice. For some people that may hold true, but I would expect a data engineer to know everything about distributed systems, database indexes, how different databases work and why you pick them, partitioning, replication, transactions/locking. These are topics a software engineer is typically familiar with. A DevOps engineer wouldn't be.
