I'm currently a "data engineer" working remotely for an startup in the US. I write that in between quotes because, since it's an startup, I end up doing tons of different stuff, from more DevOps like stuff to backend.
I'm also about to finish my masters in the next couple months (focusing in some nice machine learning stuff), and will likely continue with a phd after that since that's the only way for me to "force" myself to keep working in a project I have, mostly as a hobby.
I actually started working as a networking trainee, but then moved into embedded systems, and finally decided that data would pay me better and allow me to work remotely.