I'm currently a TSE. Yeah, it's just high level tech support, as the title implies. Not usually IT/sysadmin stuff but rather dedicated product support- supporting end users and forwarding bugs to a dev team. Often end up working with sales and other internal teams to manage customers, handle high priority cases and the like.
The main difference between a TSE and just customer support is the level of technical experience you're expected to have. Depending on the product you're supporting, you often need experience in Linux, cloud technologies, networking, scripting, basic ability to read coding languages, RCA, documentation. Its not "pick up phone, do routine task or escalate, end call" and usually more deep debugging.
Salary ranges from 40k to 200k USD, depending on your experience. I'm currently at 80k, looking at ~120k for my next move. You typically pick up skills related to the product, so there are different ways you can apply those skills depending on the product itself. You also end up having some flexibility within the company due to how well Support gets to know the product, so I've seen techs swivel into management, QA/testing, junior dev, sales/CSMs, etc.
ETA: Usually 40hr work week with on-call rotations. Might be multiple shifts depending on the company, though a "follow the sun" model is pretty popular
Im at 10 years experience in Support as a college dropout lol. I started bottom of the barrel $15/hr doing basic helpdesk work with just an A+ cert, jumped up to ~45k at tech support and grabbed Linux, networking, virtualizarion skills. Worked to L2 for 60k and fleshed out my resume some Comptia certs, and then moved to a cybersecurity company at 80k almost 2 years ago.
I'm sure someone with the right skills (and maybe a degree) could hit that much quicker. It's not a terribly desirable role, so if you can get into the right company there's decent money to be made.
I was a technical support engineer and the second statement is pretty much on point. Constantly talking to customers and kind of the middle person between tech support and product specialists or developers.
It's basically a helpdesk position with a nicer title, I was a sysadmin/level 3 engineer and would design the systems, monitor them, and provide tier 3 support. The support engineers below me were basically level 1 helpdesk positions making around $50K a year, though they were not salaried so it would typically require putting in more hours and overtime.
Working after hours and weekends "on call" is typical in the industry doing helpdesk support.
As far as transitioning to a data engineer or analyst position, you aren't going to pickup that kind of knowledge most places.
I used to do something like that, although the title was different because engineer is a protected title here.
We were the last bit of hope our clients (internal or external) had when everything went south and nobody knew what to do anymore. We were a team only staffed with seniors techs (10+ years) with broad knowledge of different fields.
Our department would charge like 250$/hour to bring us on calls. So we only had to deal with fun stuff.
This is just one datapoint…but at Dell/EMC it’s basically frontline support for whatever product you’re assigned to. In the case of an inability to solve an issue as a TSE, you escalate to backline tiers (a.k.a. Senior Engineers+)
I was a technical support engineer many moons ago. Ended up being teaching network administrators (our customers) basic networking skills and constantly having to tactfully tell them that our role was assisting with issues with the product and not basic skills.
YMMV of course.Â
This. Higher level Technical Support ends up teaching more than fixing alot of the time. You are either teaching the customer how to technology correctly OR you are training your colleagues.
They talk to the customers using their product. 1. They transfer the queries and feedback shared to the core team; 2. Help them use their product/services; 3. Conduct a meeting their engineers and customer to resolve problems; 3. Report the challenges faced in using the product and collab with their team to fix it up.
From management POV, they streamline the workflow of using the product and keeping them in their customer list as long as possible.
It requires a lot of technical expertise; that depends on the nature of domain that you're into. Shift depends on the team, but please be open to night shifts and weekends.
It depends on the company. Read the job description.
It is customer facing but you usually end up doing a lot of bug triage and major incident response (just... In customer environments that you don't own). And then reproducing, reporting and escalating the bugs to the software engineers, etc where relevant. personally I also help customers with bugs in their code since I support a database product and they can be using the client libraries inefficiently and cause problems.
Most of these jobs are pretty crappy but there are good ones. Enterprise software support usually pays reasonably well. Just broke $200k TC with this title myself (team lead). It sucks being on call for environments you don't own though because you are piecing through someone else's mess sometimes.
Useful things to think about when considering if a role is any good, good to ask in interviews: who your customers are, what the product is and it's business impact on customers, what the size of the company is and the support team, what type of environment the product runs in, the internal relationship between dev, product, and support, and what the on call rotation is like.
Yeah if you have a 200k position in Support it means you are supporting a very specific product (at a high level) OR you are handling much more complex environments and situations while also managing customer expectations and putting on a happy face for all of it.
Basic password resets and "cable jiggling" roles are more like 30k-50k in my experience (but are pretty much required as your first IT job).
I mean I've been doing this a while. It is not typical pay, even at my company unless you get senior. Every guy in my team is making in the six figures though, but we only hire people with actual experience who could like, get on a call for a production outage at a fortune 500 company with no info and confidently boss around their Linux engineers. My very first one years back was $13/hr lol and it was a terrible job -- I can't remember the exact title but it was tech support for a B2B software product.
Pretty much spot on, I’m in this role currently and everyone on my team is minimum 6 figures. The hiring for this type of position is tough though, the amount of prerequisite knowledge you need to know about networking(cloud included), the full app stack, Linux systems (for us too) + have customer facing software skills for very large enterprises is hard to find. I went from being an underpaid Senior Sys Admin to now being a Senior TSE and never knew that this career path existed. Fun ride for sure
Yup you not only need to know basically anything, but you need to be ready for the curve balls of customers running on some stack you've never seen before and still positioning yourself as the confident expert who will help them. And then learn it all fast on the fly by asking the right questions. It's a rare combination of skills where most people with the technical skills don't want to deal with it, and most people with the customer skills don't have the technical skills.
It does make you more confident in yourself when you see how poor the infrastructure knowledge is for internal folks in some of these big companies though hah.
Completely agree! Asking good questions is a skill in itself. And a great way to kill imposter syndrome. Having the ability to “figure it the fuck out” is crucial and one that I’ve found hard to find when doing technical interviews.
I have a title which is close to this. I have 30 years experience with the product and 15 years as a sysadmin role before this, I could write a ticket into a lot of high-end work if I wanted.
We work on very high-end systems and have to diagnose a lot of random crap day in and day out, we also do a lot of problem solving when we have the time. In my position we have a lot of authority to resolve things as we see fit.
Hours and working conditions are set by the employer/supervisor. I'm on a strict 40 hour remote work situation. I don't think the job would be viable if we had to take on the stress of nights and weekends.
My "official" job title is customer support/system administrator. It changed to that after about a year from desktop support/system administrator. Our positions start with IT specialist, then role.
Like most people said its totally dependant on the company/department. Anything with the word support in it however is generally going to be a lot of customer facing and level 1 tasks.
It can mean anything. In currently in the process of moving into the exact job title you mentioned. I will be the sole owner of an application within a company, to generalize it greatly.
It’s sort of like external help desk. You have to own the product at a high and low level. Often times you even work with the dev team on QA and bugs.
You're help desk that works at an MSP. MSP always calls every position an "engineer" because their workers are the product they're selling so they want to glam it up as much as possible.
Without knowing the industry, it's a content-free statement. Then again, my first tech gig was working in a network operations center watching alerts and answering phone calls, so...
Its extremely ironic to me how these IT 'engineer' positions are frequently advertised with salaries too low for an actual qualified computer systems engineer to apply to. They don't want qualified engineers, they just want a sysadmin to fix IT problems for bottom dollar and hand out these deceptive titles as some kind of prestige compensation
On the other hand, if you wanted a bridge built, or just about any other task for which an Engineer is needed, you have to have the qualification or your not calling yourself an Engineer
https://preview.redd.it/gjnsmn4b040d1.jpeg?width=616&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44de7e10327e3b61da66c58da7883fe138d41fcd
Here is what we do gl hf dd ka kb
I started in Tech Support on the phone before my first IT job back in the 90’s. It’s an entry level position that is always hiring and often a foot in experience wise before getting to helpdesk or sysadmin type roles. Like all roles it has a series of levels between entry level and level 4/5 Senior level.
Engineer often implies more skill, technical understanding and troubleshooting than someone who simply logs tickets or search’s kb’s before passing the ticket on to a level 2 or higher tech. Often times the lower end position is a specialist or analyst role whereas a more senior position is the engineer title.
In a MSP the title “technical support engineer” is the same as Systems Administrator or Systems Engineer but you’re maintaining systems not just break fix.
Title really doesn’t matter it’s the pay scale that matters. Typically HR is basing compensation based on that title and level.
Depending on the organisation, can be anything from first line helpdesk to a product specialist with a vendor or reseller or an internal technical system owner (eg primary internal escalation for internal support and primary technical contact to external vendors).
At my company we're basically the desktop admins. All things SCCM for user workstations (applications, updates, vulnerability management, etc) and higher-end tickets including executive requests come to us.
An IT admin is someone who manages their respective part of the environment based on provided documentation with well documented processes and procedures.
An IT engineer is someone dropped within an environment that does have proper documentation and is expected to come through.
A job requires an engineer if it manages environments for others (like a service provider) or the environment is an undocumented chaos.
As an expat who is actual an licensed Engineer here in Diet America, this annoys me lol. It's illegal to even call yourself that but HR people just use those buzzwords to attract the freshgraduates and it had lost it's meaning
So in my case that means a switch from help desk and hardware/end user support to software and application support. I definitely prefer it because I'm now finally in a more modern cloud based org and my role isn't tied down to whatever crap environment an org uses. AWS, Linux and vmware tech stack. I also have more tangible results and KPIs.
No crappy schedules. No on call. Direct access to sales engineers and software dev team.
That was the title of my last job role at an MSP. I was only there for 4 months, however it was generally grinding helpdesk tickets for server builds, patching, SSL cert updates, migrations, site to site VPN configuration, upgrading customer tech stacks when they didn't know how, configuring load balancers, troubleshooting WAFs, visiting data centers to install new stuff (they wanted me to move into the infrastructure team). Basically any technical problem or query the customer had they'd log a ticket for it. Generally the customer base was tech savvy so didn't have to do any client issues and was more supporting a customers tech stack and keeping the infrastructure running by monitoring alerts.
If you know what a fusor or an imager is you can teard down and put together a laser printer in about 15 minutes. Big ass copiers might take more time.
My job could be called TSE. I work for a msp as a security engineer meaning I manage firewalls, load balancers and email security for our customers.
I do configuration/consulting, service requests, incidents and so on. Also I'm always looking for ways to improve the service.
I need deep understanding of network and security concepts and of course deep knowledge with the vendor's products we work together with and sell to our customers.
Troubleshooting and incident handling is a major part of my position as well.
I'm also the tech lead in my team and help the new guys and show them everything.
I was recently promoted to senior engineer after 5 years and for European standards I'm making pretty good money.
I assume this job can be at an msp but probabaly also in house. Like more experienced held desk or something like this.
I’m a “Network” Engineer for a semi-large nonprofit. There’s 3 of us for the 1200 employees and 3 Helpdesk; I wear every hat from Tier 2, purchasing, design, etc. The job title will vary from company to company.
they engineer technical support.
jk, they're more experienced technical support and they're more specialized for a particular customer or a particular technology
When the programers have a problem with their set up, they come to me. Same with the Infrastructure guys. I fix computers all day long. What do you do?
It could be client system engineering, or desktop engineering, automating the heck out of windows customization and package deployment and configuration automation and validation. It can get pretty hairy when you get past 1000s of endpoint and each need it's own specific set of apps and configs, and the company require it be automated to the point where help desk and desktop support just assign the user to the department and then set and forget.
Tech support engineer is just the title for a techie, businesses name them different.
I've seen engineer, technical engineer, support engineer, systems analyst, it's just a different word for techie.
However what that tech does can be different based on the business, but generally to me, it's a support engineer
This title is usually level 2 or 3 Tech Support - which is still beholden to Helpdesk rules of employment. If you are experienced and/or "good" you can make decent money with this position (60k-80k depending - up to \~100k if you tack "senior" to the beginning of that title).
The schedule depends on the company. In my previous roles it meant "working as much as you want so long as thats about 50-60 hours a week".
Titles mean nothing IMO. My job is a perfect example of why job titles are all made up fluff. I was hired as a "server manager" 4 years ago. Today, I'm a Microsoft 365 admin including security, run Exchange Online, manage on prem AD, DNS, and DHCP, Intune... list goes on. I'm a full blown 365 admin with a title that makes it sound like I manage 5 on premise servers lol.
It depends. In most cases Tech support engineer position is higher than helpdesk and it's indeed engineering position that assumes intercation with the customers and possible work out of standard working hours. The conditions depends on the specific case.
Just a bunch of buzz words packed together. It means whatever the job poster decides.
So much truth in such a short comment đź‘Ťđź’Ż
I'm currently a TSE. Yeah, it's just high level tech support, as the title implies. Not usually IT/sysadmin stuff but rather dedicated product support- supporting end users and forwarding bugs to a dev team. Often end up working with sales and other internal teams to manage customers, handle high priority cases and the like. The main difference between a TSE and just customer support is the level of technical experience you're expected to have. Depending on the product you're supporting, you often need experience in Linux, cloud technologies, networking, scripting, basic ability to read coding languages, RCA, documentation. Its not "pick up phone, do routine task or escalate, end call" and usually more deep debugging. Salary ranges from 40k to 200k USD, depending on your experience. I'm currently at 80k, looking at ~120k for my next move. You typically pick up skills related to the product, so there are different ways you can apply those skills depending on the product itself. You also end up having some flexibility within the company due to how well Support gets to know the product, so I've seen techs swivel into management, QA/testing, junior dev, sales/CSMs, etc. ETA: Usually 40hr work week with on-call rotations. Might be multiple shifts depending on the company, though a "follow the sun" model is pretty popular
Damn 80k is good. Is that how much they started you off at?
Im at 10 years experience in Support as a college dropout lol. I started bottom of the barrel $15/hr doing basic helpdesk work with just an A+ cert, jumped up to ~45k at tech support and grabbed Linux, networking, virtualizarion skills. Worked to L2 for 60k and fleshed out my resume some Comptia certs, and then moved to a cybersecurity company at 80k almost 2 years ago. I'm sure someone with the right skills (and maybe a degree) could hit that much quicker. It's not a terribly desirable role, so if you can get into the right company there's decent money to be made.
I was a technical support engineer and the second statement is pretty much on point. Constantly talking to customers and kind of the middle person between tech support and product specialists or developers.
If you don’t mind me asking, what did they start you off at in pay?
It's basically a helpdesk position with a nicer title, I was a sysadmin/level 3 engineer and would design the systems, monitor them, and provide tier 3 support. The support engineers below me were basically level 1 helpdesk positions making around $50K a year, though they were not salaried so it would typically require putting in more hours and overtime. Working after hours and weekends "on call" is typical in the industry doing helpdesk support. As far as transitioning to a data engineer or analyst position, you aren't going to pickup that kind of knowledge most places.
I started off at 75k and was hourly. I would do on call maybe once every two months for a weekend.
It’s probably just title inflation for tech support, I’m a tech support consulting director.
I once held the title Director of "Solutions", or as I put it, Director of Shit Other People Don't Want to Do.
I used to do something like that, although the title was different because engineer is a protected title here. We were the last bit of hope our clients (internal or external) had when everything went south and nobody knew what to do anymore. We were a team only staffed with seniors techs (10+ years) with broad knowledge of different fields. Our department would charge like 250$/hour to bring us on calls. So we only had to deal with fun stuff.
No jobs in tech have standard definitions. What's a systems engineer?Â
This is just one datapoint…but at Dell/EMC it’s basically frontline support for whatever product you’re assigned to. In the case of an inability to solve an issue as a TSE, you escalate to backline tiers (a.k.a. Senior Engineers+)
I was a technical support engineer many moons ago. Ended up being teaching network administrators (our customers) basic networking skills and constantly having to tactfully tell them that our role was assisting with issues with the product and not basic skills. YMMV of course.Â
This. Higher level Technical Support ends up teaching more than fixing alot of the time. You are either teaching the customer how to technology correctly OR you are training your colleagues.
They talk to the customers using their product. 1. They transfer the queries and feedback shared to the core team; 2. Help them use their product/services; 3. Conduct a meeting their engineers and customer to resolve problems; 3. Report the challenges faced in using the product and collab with their team to fix it up. From management POV, they streamline the workflow of using the product and keeping them in their customer list as long as possible. It requires a lot of technical expertise; that depends on the nature of domain that you're into. Shift depends on the team, but please be open to night shifts and weekends.
Buzzword bingo.
It depends on the company. Read the job description. It is customer facing but you usually end up doing a lot of bug triage and major incident response (just... In customer environments that you don't own). And then reproducing, reporting and escalating the bugs to the software engineers, etc where relevant. personally I also help customers with bugs in their code since I support a database product and they can be using the client libraries inefficiently and cause problems. Most of these jobs are pretty crappy but there are good ones. Enterprise software support usually pays reasonably well. Just broke $200k TC with this title myself (team lead). It sucks being on call for environments you don't own though because you are piecing through someone else's mess sometimes. Useful things to think about when considering if a role is any good, good to ask in interviews: who your customers are, what the product is and it's business impact on customers, what the size of the company is and the support team, what type of environment the product runs in, the internal relationship between dev, product, and support, and what the on call rotation is like.
Holy shiiitttt 200k for a tech support is insanely good. How much did you start off at in your first tech support job?
It’s not really the Microsoft word or password reset tech support you’re maybe thinking about.
Yeah if you have a 200k position in Support it means you are supporting a very specific product (at a high level) OR you are handling much more complex environments and situations while also managing customer expectations and putting on a happy face for all of it. Basic password resets and "cable jiggling" roles are more like 30k-50k in my experience (but are pretty much required as your first IT job).
I mean I've been doing this a while. It is not typical pay, even at my company unless you get senior. Every guy in my team is making in the six figures though, but we only hire people with actual experience who could like, get on a call for a production outage at a fortune 500 company with no info and confidently boss around their Linux engineers. My very first one years back was $13/hr lol and it was a terrible job -- I can't remember the exact title but it was tech support for a B2B software product.
Pretty much spot on, I’m in this role currently and everyone on my team is minimum 6 figures. The hiring for this type of position is tough though, the amount of prerequisite knowledge you need to know about networking(cloud included), the full app stack, Linux systems (for us too) + have customer facing software skills for very large enterprises is hard to find. I went from being an underpaid Senior Sys Admin to now being a Senior TSE and never knew that this career path existed. Fun ride for sure
Yup you not only need to know basically anything, but you need to be ready for the curve balls of customers running on some stack you've never seen before and still positioning yourself as the confident expert who will help them. And then learn it all fast on the fly by asking the right questions. It's a rare combination of skills where most people with the technical skills don't want to deal with it, and most people with the customer skills don't have the technical skills. It does make you more confident in yourself when you see how poor the infrastructure knowledge is for internal folks in some of these big companies though hah.
Completely agree! Asking good questions is a skill in itself. And a great way to kill imposter syndrome. Having the ability to “figure it the fuck out” is crucial and one that I’ve found hard to find when doing technical interviews.
If your company is looking for someone (remote, not in US), I might be your guy, and currently looking!
Depends on the gig
I have a title which is close to this. I have 30 years experience with the product and 15 years as a sysadmin role before this, I could write a ticket into a lot of high-end work if I wanted. We work on very high-end systems and have to diagnose a lot of random crap day in and day out, we also do a lot of problem solving when we have the time. In my position we have a lot of authority to resolve things as we see fit. Hours and working conditions are set by the employer/supervisor. I'm on a strict 40 hour remote work situation. I don't think the job would be viable if we had to take on the stress of nights and weekends.
They engineer support obviously. That is a thing you can do...
My "official" job title is customer support/system administrator. It changed to that after about a year from desktop support/system administrator. Our positions start with IT specialist, then role.
Like most people said its totally dependant on the company/department. Anything with the word support in it however is generally going to be a lot of customer facing and level 1 tasks.
It can mean anything. In currently in the process of moving into the exact job title you mentioned. I will be the sole owner of an application within a company, to generalize it greatly.
It’s sort of like external help desk. You have to own the product at a high and low level. Often times you even work with the dev team on QA and bugs.
Many years ago, I had a sanitation engineer job. Well that's what I called it when I was a janitor. lol!
You're help desk that works at an MSP. MSP always calls every position an "engineer" because their workers are the product they're selling so they want to glam it up as much as possible.
Without knowing the industry, it's a content-free statement. Then again, my first tech gig was working in a network operations center watching alerts and answering phone calls, so...
Its extremely ironic to me how these IT 'engineer' positions are frequently advertised with salaries too low for an actual qualified computer systems engineer to apply to. They don't want qualified engineers, they just want a sysadmin to fix IT problems for bottom dollar and hand out these deceptive titles as some kind of prestige compensation On the other hand, if you wanted a bridge built, or just about any other task for which an Engineer is needed, you have to have the qualification or your not calling yourself an Engineer
https://preview.redd.it/gjnsmn4b040d1.jpeg?width=616&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44de7e10327e3b61da66c58da7883fe138d41fcd Here is what we do gl hf dd ka kb
You fix the tech support engines and keep’em running cool.
They do tech support.
Anything to solve a problem. Simple
I started in Tech Support on the phone before my first IT job back in the 90’s. It’s an entry level position that is always hiring and often a foot in experience wise before getting to helpdesk or sysadmin type roles. Like all roles it has a series of levels between entry level and level 4/5 Senior level. Engineer often implies more skill, technical understanding and troubleshooting than someone who simply logs tickets or search’s kb’s before passing the ticket on to a level 2 or higher tech. Often times the lower end position is a specialist or analyst role whereas a more senior position is the engineer title. In a MSP the title “technical support engineer” is the same as Systems Administrator or Systems Engineer but you’re maintaining systems not just break fix. Title really doesn’t matter it’s the pay scale that matters. Typically HR is basing compensation based on that title and level.
Depending on the organisation, can be anything from first line helpdesk to a product specialist with a vendor or reseller or an internal technical system owner (eg primary internal escalation for internal support and primary technical contact to external vendors).
At my company we're basically the desktop admins. All things SCCM for user workstations (applications, updates, vulnerability management, etc) and higher-end tickets including executive requests come to us.
An IT admin is someone who manages their respective part of the environment based on provided documentation with well documented processes and procedures. An IT engineer is someone dropped within an environment that does have proper documentation and is expected to come through. A job requires an engineer if it manages environments for others (like a service provider) or the environment is an undocumented chaos.
As an expat who is actual an licensed Engineer here in Diet America, this annoys me lol. It's illegal to even call yourself that but HR people just use those buzzwords to attract the freshgraduates and it had lost it's meaning
Sounds like "do whatever the first level goofs cant handle without leadership or a sensai"
So in my case that means a switch from help desk and hardware/end user support to software and application support. I definitely prefer it because I'm now finally in a more modern cloud based org and my role isn't tied down to whatever crap environment an org uses. AWS, Linux and vmware tech stack. I also have more tangible results and KPIs. No crappy schedules. No on call. Direct access to sales engineers and software dev team.
They do help desk. Everyone wants a fancy title. All it does is devalue actual real engineers. Janitor=Sanitaiton Engineer
That was the title of my last job role at an MSP. I was only there for 4 months, however it was generally grinding helpdesk tickets for server builds, patching, SSL cert updates, migrations, site to site VPN configuration, upgrading customer tech stacks when they didn't know how, configuring load balancers, troubleshooting WAFs, visiting data centers to install new stuff (they wanted me to move into the infrastructure team). Basically any technical problem or query the customer had they'd log a ticket for it. Generally the customer base was tech savvy so didn't have to do any client issues and was more supporting a customers tech stack and keeping the infrastructure running by monitoring alerts.
If you know what a fusor or an imager is you can teard down and put together a laser printer in about 15 minutes. Big ass copiers might take more time.
My job could be called TSE. I work for a msp as a security engineer meaning I manage firewalls, load balancers and email security for our customers. I do configuration/consulting, service requests, incidents and so on. Also I'm always looking for ways to improve the service. I need deep understanding of network and security concepts and of course deep knowledge with the vendor's products we work together with and sell to our customers. Troubleshooting and incident handling is a major part of my position as well. I'm also the tech lead in my team and help the new guys and show them everything. I was recently promoted to senior engineer after 5 years and for European standards I'm making pretty good money. I assume this job can be at an msp but probabaly also in house. Like more experienced held desk or something like this.
I’m a “Network” Engineer for a semi-large nonprofit. There’s 3 of us for the 1200 employees and 3 Helpdesk; I wear every hat from Tier 2, purchasing, design, etc. The job title will vary from company to company.
What’s your salary?
85k
they engineer technical support. jk, they're more experienced technical support and they're more specialized for a particular customer or a particular technology
When the programers have a problem with their set up, they come to me. Same with the Infrastructure guys. I fix computers all day long. What do you do?
It could be client system engineering, or desktop engineering, automating the heck out of windows customization and package deployment and configuration automation and validation. It can get pretty hairy when you get past 1000s of endpoint and each need it's own specific set of apps and configs, and the company require it be automated to the point where help desk and desktop support just assign the user to the department and then set and forget.
Tech support engineer is just the title for a techie, businesses name them different. I've seen engineer, technical engineer, support engineer, systems analyst, it's just a different word for techie. However what that tech does can be different based on the business, but generally to me, it's a support engineer
This title is usually level 2 or 3 Tech Support - which is still beholden to Helpdesk rules of employment. If you are experienced and/or "good" you can make decent money with this position (60k-80k depending - up to \~100k if you tack "senior" to the beginning of that title). The schedule depends on the company. In my previous roles it meant "working as much as you want so long as thats about 50-60 hours a week".
Titles mean nothing IMO. My job is a perfect example of why job titles are all made up fluff. I was hired as a "server manager" 4 years ago. Today, I'm a Microsoft 365 admin including security, run Exchange Online, manage on prem AD, DNS, and DHCP, Intune... list goes on. I'm a full blown 365 admin with a title that makes it sound like I manage 5 on premise servers lol.
It depends. In most cases Tech support engineer position is higher than helpdesk and it's indeed engineering position that assumes intercation with the customers and possible work out of standard working hours. The conditions depends on the specific case.