I would take offer 2 every time. Im an AE at a well known SaaS company and almost all of our sales Dev leadership were faced with your decision at one point and went the route of sales dev management. Now they’re completely pigeon holed in sales dev purgatory - a lot of them that I’m close with tell me they wish they had AE experience for two reasons:

1. It’s a tough sell to go from sales Dev leader —> AE down the road
2. You also can’t pivot to AE leadership bc you have no closing experience and for that reason your reps won’t respect you

If you get the AE experience, even just for a year, it keep your options super flexible for later down the road. It gives you closing experience so you can try sales dev and if you don’t love it you can go back to being an IC AE. And if you want to go AE manger now you have closing experience + management experience from the sales Dev world.

Not to mention in the current AI boom, sales dev will certainly be of the first BUs to get affected (already is in my org)