Data scientists are too comfortable with R, while software engineers won't touch it with a ten foot pole. So to move forward in the career you allude to, defini

Data scientists are too comfortable with R, while software engineers won't touch it with a ten foot pole. So to move forward in the career you allude to, definitely use Python in your current role as much as possible, and push yourself with engineering-like tasks/skills (e.g. volunteer to work on that CI/CD pipeline, don't just use numpy but understand how it writes to memory, etc.).