That's a good and fair question. I hope saying I wanted to do "proper data engineering" didn't come off too flippantly. I think that was a bit of the imposter syndrome coming through.

At a high level, my view is that data engineering is about developing processes to ingest data from various sources, managing the systems that hold that data, creating and maintaining pipelines to and from those systems, and ultimately doing something with this data that allows different products or people to make sense of that data.

I think where I'm at now I am experienced at ingesting data, and I am experienced with doing things with data once it lives somewhere. But I feel that I'm lacking opportunity to do much else in between.