The work by a systems engineer depends on where they work. When I worked in roles described as systems engineer, it required me to design, specify, manage staf

The work by a systems engineer depends on where they work. When I worked in roles described as systems engineer, it required me to design, specify, manage staff and contractors and often do some hands-on work. It included AC power circuits, air conditioning, data centre physical security, racking layouts, hot / cold aisle allocation, network design and configuration, SAN and network cabling, scripting, administering *nix servers (I don't touch MS products), being a DBA and supporting users. Basically the only thing I didn't work on was programming application software. But did write lots of shell scripts to handle interoperability requirements for poorly intergrated ERP systems.