"1 "systems engineer" (not sure what this means, but doesn't seem like it involves programming since they taught themselves Python after getting laid off)"

It's something of a catch-all term I think. When I had that title at an investment management firm many years ago I was mostly setting up external data feeds with bash and Perl to be loaded into a database and republished as datasets (in SAS) for consumption by portfolio managers and research so it did involve programming in that instance; probably closer to what a "Data Engineer" does today.