Testing, fuzzing, and verification are all pretty hot SE topics now, at least in my department at CMU. All of those have some element of program analysis, both

Testing, fuzzing, and verification are all pretty hot SE topics now, at least in my department at CMU. All of those have some element of program analysis, both static and dynamic, so there's potentially deep PL stuff, which is core CS. There's aspects to SE that are not just that, of course, which are studying social processes, management styles and practices, software architectures, design patterns, API design, etc.