Not a stupid question at all! Imo, you can definitely dive deep into CUDA and GPU architecture without needing to be a math whiz. Think of it like this: you can be a great car mechanic without being the engineer who designed the engine.

Start with understanding parallel computing concepts and how GPUs are structured for it. Optimization is key - learn about memory access patterns, thread management, and how to profile your code to find bottlenecks. There are tons of great resources online, and NVIDIA's own documentation is surprisingly good.

As for the data engineering side, tbh, it's tougher to get into MLE without ML knowledge. However, focusing on the data pipeline, feature engineering, and data quality aspects for ML projects might be