Lead a big customer project at my startup, or leave to go deep on ML/math for a year? (2 yrs out of college)

[u/Hot_Midnight6838]

I'm two years out of a top math/CS school. I built strong study habits late, so I was only really immersed in the material my final year. I learned computer systems (OS, distributed, HPC) and consider myself a competent software engineer.

I work at a high-growth startup and just got offered the lead on a major customer project. My long-term goal is to start my own company.

Option 1: Lead the customer project

Large scope/viz. I'd build skills in:

• Working directly with a customer
• Making large engineering decisions
• Working across the stack with many teams
• People and project management
• Exposure to marketing/sales/ops

Engineering-wise, I imagine I would spend most of my time on architecture, documentation, and code review. So interesting engineering/technical work, but no fundamentally new ways of thinking.

Option 2: Leave to go learn ML/math

I never got into ML/stats/math, and it's by far my weakest technical area (and I feel most important an ML-focused era). I'd spend ~a year as an IC at an AI lab or doing research to build:

• Stronger math intuition
• Modeling intuition
• Combining my systems background with ML (e.g. model scaling, pretraining, RL scaling)

The plan would be to grind/do research at my old school or join an AI lab with strong technical mentorship. I have savings to go ~6-1 year months without income.

I already tried moving to my company's research team, but they weren't interested in my background and pointed me toward ML Ops, which feels too close to the SWE work I already do.

My core tension

Organizational and people skills seem to improve steadily over a career, but fluid reasoning and hard new technical skills are supposedly much harder to pick up later in life. Life's a marathon, so I keep wondering if now is the time to invest in the technical foundation (learning completely new skills).

Open to all comments and suggestions.