Current VP Cloud Engineer/SWE Back Office Monkey, Looking to Pivot to FO/Equity Research/Trading/Anything

Hello,

A little about me, I'm a 33-year-old Principal Software Engineer, with a background and passion for capital markets. I worked at a hedge fund the last year but I couldn't get out of the back office and could not see a way out, so I pivoted to working at an AI start-up.

I currently hate my role at the start-up and want to finally go after a front office type of role where I work as an equity researcher, trader, quant/algo dev, or anything that is out of the back office slog. I've gotten some good recruitment traction from firms like DRW, Two Sigma, Millennium, etc, but those are all for back office dev roles... but at least they're quant shops and not activist/event driven funds (think Pershing Square, Third Point).

I'd like to leverage my skills as an engineer but I don't mind even going on the sell side of the front office (I hear the sell side is a grind and brutal but if it's my only way in, I might have to take it, but ideally I'd land something on buy-side instead.) I'm even tempted to just bite the bullet and join a prop shop and get on a trading desk, even if it means putting up some initial capital.

Does anyone have any advice or ideas of what I can be doing to polish myself as a candidate that banks or research firms would take a shot at me? Does it make sense to start publishing my own research on say Seeking Alpha and Medium? I've already done some of that with SaaS and Cloud companies in terms of comparing cloud service providers, SaaS products, etc.

I've been focusing a bit more on data analysis and learning about portfolio management with SQL and Python. I've been told I should go after an MS or MBA... but I've also seen some online courses like Financial Edge https://www.fe.training/ -- would these courses be worth my time and money? Or even some on WSO?

TLDR; How can a back office software engineer pivot to a front office buy/sell side analyst?

Thank you all for any tips or advice.