That isn't necessarily wrong. Many distributed systems engineers work in the energy sector, which is a giant distributed system.

Same for EN to DE - something about energy. Completely wrong, but with pictures!

It probably just looked up the first match for that literal string in the English wiki, which is the article about "Distributed generation" (of energy).

I asked ChatGPT to translate "Distributed Systems Engineer" into Russian and to explain it. It chose "Инженер распределенных систем" as the translation (literal, but fine!), and proceeded to give a spot-on explanation in Russian.

As a polyglot these new language models seem very promising for translation work, especially as well-constrained tasks leave them little room for "hallucination".