Ask HN: How to Build a Career as Machine Learning Engineer?

I am a software engineer, who is involved in building (backend) data products (from building ETL, data-warehousing, scaling DB, .. etc).

My question to those who work in big companies and applied research labs, do engineers need to have MSc/PhD in Artificial Intelligence/Data Science to grow in the company.

I am not a data scientist, I am interested more into enabling Machine Learning in production (https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/becoming-a-machine-learning-engineer).

What are you recommendations ?