Senior Engineering Leader with Finance Industry Experience -> Trading Career Advice

Hi,

I am 37 and I have been working for 10 years in the financial industry at an Interest Rate Derivatives InterDealer broker first, where I helped implementing the research of two university professors that were consulting at the company. I have built a centralized pricing engine for IRS based on numerical optimization to price FRA, IRS, Basis Swaps and Cross Currency Basis Swaps, in Java using a mix of technologies including connectivity to Bloomberg, In Memory Data Grid (GigaSpaces), etc.

I then joined Goldman Sachs in London writing software for interest rate derivatives trading, but I was doing more of a platform role. The entire numerical/strategical part was developed by a different quant team, but still I was able to work on a platform for market making. 

I then became a CTO and Co-Founder of a Fintech Startup active in digital lending, where I learnt the fundamentals of Credit and lead a team of 18 engineers. After disagreeing on the future strategy with the CEO, I decided to change and moved to US on a visa to work as the engineering leader at a biotech startup in California. I took this new role for its strong focus on machine learning and big data, even if I totally changed industry. 

I hold an MBA, I understand interest rate derivatives, DCF, capital markets, and more. I have no "formal education" in finance though. My bachelor and master of science are in electronics and computer engineering. I am considering, one day, it would be good to go back to the financial industry in a prop trading firm to leverage my unique combination of software engineering, big data, ml and financial skills.

What would you do if you were me? Is there a certification I should obtain? Is it just network? Should I start to find people interested in automated trading and try to work together on it?