[Atheb]

Not sure if my experience is relevant, but I did a couple of internships in web dev during my bachelors degree in CS and quickly realized it wasn't for me. I then did a masters and now a PhD in medical imaging where I extensively use machine learning (design and train my own models, doing both supervised and RL) but I wouldn't say I am a researcher in AI/ML.

Because I am still in the academic process, I had the opportunity to take a couple of classes on the subject. Three books that I would recommend going over to make sure your foundation in ML and mathematics are solid are

-Pattern recognition and machine learning by Christopher Bishop

-Mathematics for Machine Learning by Peter Deisenroth

-Deep Learning by Courville, Bengio and Goodfellow

All three are legally available online in some form. I can't say I have any experience in finding a job related to ML though.