My last job was at a company that designed and built satellites to order. There was a well defined process for this, and systems engineers were a big part of it. Maybe my experience there is distorting my perspective, but it seems to me that any sufficiently complex project needs to include systems engineering, even if the person doing that is not called a systems engineer. Yet as far as I can tell, it isn’t really a thing in the software industry. When I look at job postings and “about us” blog posts about how a company operates, I don’t see systems engineering mentioned. Am I just not seeing it, is it called something else, or is the majority of the industry somehow operating without it?
my guess is the software equivalent is the architect role - basically someone high level that doesn’t code much but does design the overall way that systems interact (or, to put it redundantly, designs the architecture of the full system)
however i don’t know if this term is en vogue as much anymore except for very large scale businesses (i would bet money that banks employ architects, for example)