Systems-oriented software engineer, to me, means a developer who can venture into realms of the system not normally granted a lot of attention; someone who unde

Systems-oriented software engineer, to me, means a developer who can venture into realms of the system not normally granted a lot of attention; someone who understands the code around the drivers doing all the work for some of the system component modules, for example, or who can formulate a good understanding of the behaviour of the system as a whole, sum total of its parts, and knows those parts well. Whereas a non-systems programmer sees a file-descriptor they can read from, a systems-programmer sees the driver, the cache management, the block and other layers underneath it all that make it work. i.e. not an Application developer, who assembles blocks, but rather a Systems developer, who makes blocks and destroys them at will.