What’s a “real engineer”? Railroad Engineer? Civil Engineer? Aerospace Engineer?
Often the PE is more of a lawyer than an engineer. They typically do have an engineering degree, but are years out from any hands-on engineering work. They do final legal sign-off, and are knowledgeable about statutes and insurance policies, but rely on people with more recent technical experience to do any technical work.
Which is significantly stronger than the state of software engineering.
So, a medical device engineer.