I like how you phrased it "this week"

What would you say are the key skills I should sharpen to work as a data engineer? (ofc I can google it, but I'm curious how it looks like from your experence)

Staying up late to run another iteration sounds very familiar haha. Are you happy with your change or did it turn out that the grass is greener on the other side?

I was wondering if this has something to do with lack of experience. And from what I've heard indeed the more you experiment with the models, the better you understand what helps when, to some extent.

The thing is, a neural network still remains a black box, as the number of parameters is too big to fully understand what is happening. It is an empirical study mostly. So you choose your architecture, test, change hyperparameters, test, change the architecture, test, change some other parameters, test, and so on. You can't be sure your model will work properly right away and it may take lots of iterations. With larger models which take long to train it might be overwhelming.

Of course, it might be different in your case, you can start with some toy examples, and if you still like it, I'd recommend playing with larger networks.

In case I'd like to dive into something along these lines, how such positions tend to be called?

How would you call your position? Is it software engineering / data engineering or yet something else?

Do you mean roles such as data engineer / MLOps?

The model is ready, I'm here to collect data ;)

Haha not sure if this is that comforting

High chance you're right