Getting into Big Data Engineering?

I've had an odd career path. Started in fairly blue-collar construction, moved into an office role, decided to switch career paths into something more CS related and so started doing some CS/programming/SQL stuff in my spare time.

Didn't have much luck job-hunting in a related job after that, so went on to do a Masters in Data Science - I had always enjoyed statistics and felt it went well with the CS/database stuff I had covered.

Kinda feels now like Data Science is way over-saturated at the entry level. In addition, I really enjoyed learning about nosql databases/platforms, and doing a little functional programming, so I figured maybe something in "big data engineering" would be more suitable; going to clients, finding out what their business problems are/what data they want to work with, and then helping to build an appropriate platform.

1. Is this a viable field to go into at an entry level, or should I start out in something else first (e.g. BI building data warehouses and marts, software engineering, etc).

2. The research I've done so far has presented a mixed bag of required skills. I've done a little with Hadoop, and language wise I've only worked with R and Python. What should I be working on/focusing on building up?

3. Is this even a viable career path for me or am I chasing something out of reach? I don't have a software engineering background, much less a formal CS degree, and I'm not sure how seriously my Masters in Data Science would be considered, even if it did cover some big data/nosql topics. Bear in mind I'm in the EU, which seems to have much more of a "box-ticking" culture than the US.