>So I am thinking of switching role and transitioning into a Data Scientist or AI/ML engineer. I can put in the hours to study and do self projects, but I am wo

>So I am thinking of switching role and transitioning into a Data Scientist or AI/ML engineer. I can put in the hours to study and do self projects, but I am worried if I am too old for a transition now, given that I am already 15 years old in the industry. There's a lot of the heavy lifting done in Spark (written in Scala), and many parts of the "ML" ecosystem are on the JVM, either with Scala or Java, so you can leverage your experience with that. Kafka is also used and written in Java. Often times "data scientists'" output will be a Python notebook, and in many organizations someone "translates" that to either Scala or Java if they don't want to use pySpark. My point being that you can have a smoother transition than what you imagine. A huge part of the work in "AI/ML" is not model building, and that could be your entrypoint.