I'm looking to scratch an itch I've had for years. if the experience goes well, I might consider FTE opportunities in the domain.
my background is Stanford B.Sc. (systems focus)
As someone who took 6.035, I cannot recommend it enough. It's probably the favorite class I took while in college. The class covered a lot of compiler theory during lectures but unlike other classes that involved programming there was no skeleton code or starting point for the project (4 parts, each building on each other). You got an empty git repo and a set of instructions of what your compiler interface should be in order for TAs to be able to run your compiler. You had to figure out everything on your own.