In my state, you need a license to offer engineering services to the public, but not if you work for an industrial employer. However, your design may have to go through a regulatory approval process, and the people who are hired for that work are licensed engineers. In some fields such as civil and nuclear engineering, so much of the work is regulatory, that they only hire licensed engineers as a matter of course.

In my view, "engineer" is getting harder to define. At my workplace, anybody who does anything techy and has a degree is an "engineer" if in the product development department, or a "scientist" if in R&D. Only a small handful of the engineers do what a traditionalist would recognize as "hard" quantitative engineering. Most of the work is fitting building blocks together, troubleshooting, bureaucracy, etc.