I can almost guarantee you that this is because "deep learning" is considered "advanced DS" in most corporate settings. DS has gotten so broad that, if you try

I can almost guarantee you that this is because "deep learning" is considered "advanced DS" in most corporate settings. DS has gotten so broad that, if you try to fit everything into a single category (rather than breaking it out into sub-areas like ML Engineer, Data Engineer, Research Scientistic, etc.), this is what you end up with. What "advanced" here really means is "relatively new field." You can't ask someone just out of a stats program about CNNs because they probably have never touched them, even though for someone doing a lot of DL work in CS may consider this trivial, so you mark it as intermediate. And you can't ask someone with 10 years of pre-DL experience in DS about CNNs because they've been doing forests and regression and clustering and such, so you move it from intermediate to advanced. In other words, it's "advanced" because HR wants to make sure it's "optional".