Unfortunately I don't think I'm familiar enough to recommend a particular path, but I know that I run into lots of people at programming meetups and elsewhere w

Unfortunately I don't think I'm familiar enough to recommend a particular path, but I know that I run into lots of people at programming meetups and elsewhere who write code in their day job but it's not the finished product they're delivering. For example, working for an environmental sciences consulting company where the finished product is a report on arsenic levels in water, you might write a Python script to collate data for presentation, or a quick one-off web service for people to submit data to. In these cases, I think you'd need to develop some domain knowledge first, but with an engineering background, you should have access to a fair spectrum of possibilities.