Depends what you mean by ML; there are a lot of successful ML practitioners with no formal ML education, but far fewer (but not zero!) ML researchers without th

Depends what you mean by ML; there are a lot of successful ML practitioners with no formal ML education, but far fewer (but not zero!) ML researchers without the expected academic background. Finding a small, contained use for ML in your software/data job is a good path into the former, but I have no advice on the latter.