Ask HN: How can reset my career while still providing for my family?

I am a 49 years old software developer, working for an online gambling operator. The job pays well and it is not far from my home. Other than that it is simply the worse job I’ve ever had. I had to take this position due to financial pressure after moving to a new country. Given an alternative, I would have preferred an industry other than gambling. To make matters even worse, the work is boring and repetitive. Most of the “development” I do now days is filling up C++ structures and sending them off as messages to other components via an antiquated communication layer developed in-house 15 years ago. The primary reason the company needs experienced developers is to keep at bay the multi-headed spaghetti monster which is their code-base.

The common perception among my colleagues is that this is a good as it can get at our age: yes it’s a life-sucking, mind-numbing job but it pays the bills and leaves you some time to watch television at the evenings. I simply can’t accept that this is not the kind of career I’ve signed up for.

I have been spending a significant portion of my free time keeping in pace with the latest developments machine learning and image processing which I find fascinating. It something would have loved doing as my day job. Which brings me to my question:

what should be my escape plan? If I didn’t have my family depending on me to put food on the table I could have just find another job, compromise on my salary and rework my way up. However, It's not something I can easily do with mortgage payments and getting a child through college.

What are my options?