Do I need a data engineer, or is a developer enough? — answered by Engineer Saeed Baatiah
For projects using ready models through their APIs — which is most small and mid-sized company work — an experienced developer who understands working with data is enough. You need a dedicated data engineer when handling millions of records, building a data warehouse, or running daily pipelines over large volumes. Start with the former and add the latter only when data volume itself becomes the bottleneck.