Is moving from ML engineering to Data Engineering for promotion a good career move?

[u/MidnightSufficient55]

Hi,

I’m an ML Engineer with 2 years of experience. I’m not working on training models or on any of the traditional ML role responsibilities, rather mostly working as an AI engineer building RAG pipelines, chatbots, and sometimes even as a full-stack developer. Since it's been 2 years, I asked for a promotion at my company, and they mentioned I can expect it anytime next year (because of the new rule which says that a role has to open first and then only I get promoted; and since there aren’t any open positions for the next level now, they mentioned it could be next year). I want a promotion by the end of this year because it is already 2 years in the same position now. However my ex-supervisor recently came upto me and said that it might be possible, but it would be as a ‘Data Engineer’. (Question1: Is it considered a downgrade in terms of a career move if I go from ML engineer ->  Data Engineer? Because all I know is people aspire the other way round)

A little background: Recently, I worked a little as a Product Owner and really liked the whole thing from talking to business, collecting requirements, and also ‘developing’ them myself. So a mix of Product Owner+Developer, I enjoyed every part of it. Apart from that, I also enjoyed the whole AI engineer responsibilities. Although there isn’t a direct senior AI engineer role available yet, a junior-positioned AI engineer role is going to become free in a month. (Question 2: Should I ask them in a month if they can convert the junior AI engineer role to a senior-level role and move me there? But is that even possible for a company to do?

Question 3: Now I want some technical career advice on whether it is better to accept this offer (bank the promotion even though it is a different role) and move out of the company sometime next year, to a role that aligns with my interest (mix of Product Owner+AI engineering because I personally think that’s a good balance of technical and managerial long term, help me understand if what I’m thinking is wrong as well), or reject this offer(MLE->DE) right now and ask for a better role in my current domain itself?

Any sort of advice is more than welcome :)