I recently attended a [Data Engineering Open Forum][10] in Silicon Valley — an offline community meetup organized by [Data Engineer Things][1], with talks from Airbnb, Netflix, Databricks, OpenAI and others. But what stuck with me more than any keynote was the conversation outside the auditorium: as AI rapidly reshapes how software is built, data engineers everywhere are asking the same question — where does this role go from here?
Between sessions I joined a small roundtable of about a dozen people — data engineers from Figma, Microsoft, Apple, and a few startups — sitting together to swap projects and lessons learned. A pretty common takeaway: AI does make us more efficient, but the demand side ratchets up in lockstep. The faster AI lets you ship, the more your manager expects you to take on. While the data infra vend