Please don't fall for the "sexiest job of the 21st century" adline.The wife works as a sw dev on a speech rec team(one of the popular ones) and she works with P.hD "Data Scientists" which are looking at getting in to dev. If you apply the pareto rule, "Data science" is 80% Cleaning and 20% ML. Hardcore ML research is totally different which requires atleast a MS with ML focus and pedigree plays a huge part. Here is a thought. Why don't you try rewriting stuff you did with Simulink in Python. My man, Downey got you covered https://github.com/AllenDowney/ModSimPy. I would recommend that you start with Think Python before tackling this book.