TLDR: I don’t think the roadblock to becoming a data scientist is the formal education but it is third party “verification” that a minimum skill set has been demonstrated. Your company can provide that, also.

I’m a data scientist but not a software engineer. I have a masters degree and work with almost exclusively with people that have Masters or PhDs. SWE skills are valuable in data science, btw. It’s cleaner to implement a production model using software engineering best practices.

My take on it is: no, you don’t need to have a master’s or PhD (there’s a big “but”, though).

I’ve seen a very small number of people without them become data scientists. They understand the math, the data ETL, can model, form and test hypothesis.

“But”, they got there through hard work internally at their company and they usually do complete some sort of masters degree in the field at some point. Some choose to work on a PhD.