Sure, I started as a researcher 14 years ago, then drifted to what I thought was a sweet spot then, half-research / half-programmer. I say 'sweet spot' because many applications did require both the academic and the applied background at the time, so for the sake of thrilling applications, it was worth 'downgrading' to pure engineering work when needed. Now I believe the game has changed a bit, coursera and others are infusing the minds of engineers with highly technical knowledge far more rapidly than before.

Typically I am astonished at the number of implementations of deep learning techniques (Shark does include some, AFAIK).

My past experience is that I had write many AI algorithms myself because I could not find any suitable, free and/or open implementations (or other researchers would not share theirs ;) ).