The missing role is not a brand-new role. It is a discipline that has existed for less than a decade, is still not clearly understood at the leadership level, and has no standardized hiring rubric at most organizations. It is the analytics engineer, and the absence of this role is why most enterprise AI deployments seem to stall before they scale. What is analytics engineering ? Analytics engineering sits right at the intersection between data engineering, data science and business intelligence — it is the discipline responsible for transforming raw data into a trusted, governed, reusable semantic layer with metrics and dimensions that both humans and AI systems can rely on.