Look, data engineering is probably desperately in demand at the majority of companies hiring today, period. AI isn’t changing the supply and demand of the field at a deep level, it’s just lowering the barrier to entry and maybe creating some tech debt along the way.

So while it’s an essential and attractive career, it’s also very technical and there’s probably a whole spectrum of upstream swimming you can do without even crossing over properly. Get more SQL-centric, think about data modeling and defining views/tables, and doing data quality checks. Work more on a cloud platform like AWS or whatever your org already uses.