Does whatever you build go into production or do you need someone else / team “take care of that part”. That is where the “data science is just Statistics” people’s wheels come off when they realise production ML needs senior software engineering background.
Some of what I've built is currently in prod at a very large scale (which honestly is a bit freaky). Depends on the particular project though. Our team very rarely hands stuff off to SWEs (although they frequently code review); for the most part we implement everything ourselves.
