Probably my quotes implied sarcasm, what i should have said is there are so many hats that a “software developer” or “software engineer” is really really broad like by the wikipedia definition at my current company we typically call those “principal engineers”, or “principal architect”; i’ve also seen them called staff software engineers.

Likely it’s super domain dependent; the failure cost with a satellite’s or hardware cost you the business. Where with a website the MTTR can be very small. So a large oversight isn’t quite as needed, as the cost is so small.

If you described what a “systems engineer” did that’d be a big help.