I have a few years of experience as an ML Engineer, however I recently changed jobs and I was shocked to learn that my new employer has a very different job definition for ML Engineer than the one I was familiar with. I
thought that the standard definition of an ML Engineer is an engineer who specializes in building machine learning models, essentially a subtype of a data scientist. At my new company, an ML Engineer is someone who supports ML models but never works on machine learning directly. At this new company, ML Engineers are Data Engineers who support machine learning applications.
What is the generally accepted definition of an ML Engineer?
Job titles do not have consistent meaning across regions or industries. People use buzzwords and hype to recruit funding and talent.
You've learned an important lesson: use interviews to gather information about companies and teams. "Can you describe in broad strokes a typical project for this role?" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a hiring manager.