How can a software engineer get into computational linguistics?
You need programming chops, though nothing too flash and algorithmic.
You need to be across regexes.
You need to pick up some linguistics, but honestly, not as much as you might think. You certainly don’t need formal syntax or phonology. You will need to know what morphology is, especially if you’ll be working on languages other than English.
You will inevitably end up getting into some stats and stochastic work. The NLP that works best is statistical, not rule-based.
You can pick up a lot from Natural Language Toolkit. Python these days is the premier language for NLP, and the NLTK is the major reason why.
Look for patterns; don’t be too prescriptive; know when close enough is good enough.