Hiring Machine Learning Engineers Part 1 - Context

Recently, my team decided to hire for a Machine Learning Engineer. Whilst considering the requirements for this role, a relatively new and ill-defined one in the industry, I found myself thinking about its contrast with the Data Scientist - incidentally, the role I continue to identify mostly with. In the recent past this kind of distinction only made academic sense to me. I will confess to subconsciously thinking that a Machine Learning Engineer is someone who took the fast.