transition to data scientist for more money
Data scientist won't actually make you better paid. You might have seen 150k+ for some data scientists, but those people usually have a Phd and they can get similar salary even they do something else.

Data science is a very big field; you can work in the field as a software engineer. But don't expect training a gradient boosting model; you'll more likely be asked to process Hadloop big data application, optimization Python workflow etc.

In my experience, a data science certificate is useless. If your next position is a software engineering in data science, you don't need a certificate; you'll just need have a good proven record that you can deal with data. If you next position will be mathematical modelling, you'll need something like a Phd.