[rjmill]

SWE 10 years. I got into ML/AI recently after a background in UI development (from JS GUIs, to Python CLIs and APIs.)

AI was not on my radar as a realistic career option until the startup I was working for got acquired by <big tech company>. A couple years after the acquisition, I started exploring options and ended up taking a transfer to an AI SDK team (even though I had no experience with AI at the time.)

I build tools for the people doing the actual AI work, so in my case, it was more useful to know how to talk to users and build systems to steer people toward best practices. I'm learning more about ML/AI on the job, but I was productive from day 1 because of my software engineering skills.

I'd look at companies doing AI and see what they're looking for. You might be surprised at how much overlap there is with your current skillset. If you learn some AI skills on your own and look for jobs on the tooling side, you can probably stand out from the crowd earlier than you'd expect.