Could you please elaborate a bit more? I am your typical web-dev/frontend/backend developer, don't really know much about what is involved in data engineering.
Do you mean collecting, cleaning data? Or setting up databases (if yes, how is it different from me managing my employer's databases, except for size)?
In other words, what does a data engineer do all day?
Several data engineers that I know in this space (AI for business applications) are doing the usual ETL + mapping pipeline related work. Nowadays a lot of them are also having to deal with unstructured data such as textual reviews of products, service quality feedback, policy documents. Data engineers are developing the pipelines for chunking, vectorization, ingestion into RAG pipeline and for LLM training fine tuning. So it's still collecting, cleaning data, but quite different at the next level of detail, in my opinion.
In fact after a certain scale you need to bribe in the US too. It’s just that it’s legalized in the US as lobbying and PACs.