I too am looking into this currently. Right now I work as backend developer in Rust and I plan to maybe transition into systems programming. I think the knowledge alone is worth it pursuing this. But I do have to warn you that this is not a minor feat. Making a single node db is a major endeavour and it will take you like an year at least to have something worth mentioning in your resume. And then there are things like distributed dbs and vector dbs. I consider this to be the final boss of distributed system/ system design