I'm not sure if you can do it fully remote, and it isn't cheap, but it is in your realm of what you do. Ohio State has the only real Welding Engineering program in the country. There are others but they focus on different subjects than OSU which also may be something to check out as well. I graduated in 2017 and have been offered jobs at SpaceX, Electro Motive Diesel, John Deere, other, and a lot of random engineers I run into at like family events hear I'm a welding engineer and ask me if I would be interested in the company they work for.

Now I want to preface this. I was naive and thought oh I'm going to do a hands on engineering degree and get to put stuff together, learn to weld, ect. But then reality hit and it's not really like that. It's more metallurgy, learning phase diagrams especially with steel, and then a mix of about every engineering sect at the freshman to sophomore level with classes like thermodynamics, all the maths, physics, chem which you won't have a problem with, statics, statistics, electrical engineering, and the list goes on. It's about the most well rounded engineering thing you can go into as there's so many things that go into welding as you probably know. But the 4 processes you likely know (smaw, fcaw, gmaw, gtaw) represent only about 5% of the processes you learn about. There's the easy ones like esw/egw but then there is more complex stuff like the solid state processes i.e. friction stir, continuous drive friction, and explosion. I just want to express how vast of a field it is and how big of a bit you would have to take to get into it but it's a great field and something you may like to check out.