There is no need to jump in as a PhD. Enroll as an undergraduate anywhere that has a good department in the area you're interested in, and then express interest and work as hard as you can -- if you show promise, the faculty and graduate students will notice you and enjoy your conversation. However, if you want a paid career as a researcher, you will absolutely need a PhD.

If you're a software engineer and willing to take a pay cut, plenty of research labs will be happy to take you on.

Try to hustle your way into a Research Software Engineer [0] role somewhere. The role isn't formally acknowledged in the U.S. (outside of Google) but you can usually find them posted on university job boards as "Programmer/Analyst" or something similar. Downsides include crap pay and the potential for your job to spontaneously disappear after soft money [1] runs out.

[0] https://rse.ac.uk/who/

[1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/30621/what-is-a...

If you know python and college level statistics you should be able to find someone. Everyone needs to crunch data (and some graduate students feel its beneath them :-)