Why we built a platform for machine learning engineering -- not data science

About a year ago, a few of us began working on an open source machine learning platform, Cortex. Our motivation was simple: Building an application out of a model was a terrible experience full of glue code and boilerplate, and we wanted a tool that abstracted it all away. While we're very proud of our work on Cortex, we are just one piece of a trend we've seen accelerate over the last year, and that is the growth of the machine learning engineering ecosystem. Companies are hiring MLEs faster than ever, and the projects being released are getting better and better. While this is very exciting to us, we still frequently hear the question "What is machine learning engineering?"