The software engineer is a truly mythical creature. I've never seen one despite working in software!
Rigour in these industries appears to be just "build broken stuff slowly then blame someone else".
The primes are expensive not because they're rigorous but because they're good at government contracting. They're going to get outcompeted soon. SpaceX and Tesla have shown that there is an opportunity in government contracting. Now, newer organizations are going to be "rigorous" in their own ways.
Do you have any evidence for that claim? (And don't point me to the two Shuttle explosions. Neither of those were a software failure.)
Having done the EE curriculum and then gone to program instead (to make my bias apparent), IMO the engineer’s distinction is that they work in a model, the bounds of the model are well known, the model isn’t all of physics, and the model is simplified enough that work can be checked within it. The brilliance of engineering is that you can do productive work, on hard tasks, without being brilliant.
Also you can go to computer science conferences such as ACM conferences.
Unfortunately, when I was in undergrad, my school and other schools didn't understand that most incoming students needed "software engineering" instead of "computer science." Although there is a lot of overlap; misunderstanding the intention and purpose of students made it very hard to learn the skills we were there to learn.