Experienced dev here who took a machine learning class and found it interesting. Could I get a position in it now? Would anyone hire a grey-haired ML junior? So far my experience says no, but may be bad luck so far.
I’d argue there’s a big need for people with solid fundamental CS, sysadmin, infra skills who can bridge the gap into ML practitioner/researcher understanding. Applications or inference generally are probably easiest to break into, especially if you already have service knowledge. If you want to work on distributed training or kernel/model optimization, you probably need to prove your chops there.
Neoclouds, startups in the AI space, maybe hw vendors are probably good places to look.
Not mentioned but I've also watched almost all of the 3b1br videos. ;-)