These roles are techno-commercial in nature and the entry path could be very diverse, but those with technical background will have some advantage for sure. I've known people who've landed such roles straight out of University, while others got into it after 8/10 years of Dev/QA experience. Especially in the context of Cloud hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, it helps to have certifications that are "advanced beginner" i.e. Associate level. As the role requirement of SA/SE is significantly customer-facing, you'd need soft skills to go with your hard skills. Need to have a bit of commercial acumen about how much a particular technology costs, that helps you in building proposals about how the particular solution solves customer's business problems, presenting business case to C-suite about why they should invest for a particular technology solutions including CapEx, OpEx, ManPower & lifecycle management requirements. Every type of company needs Cloud, but oftentimes I've seen cloud costs are not part of design architecture or product decisions, so aspiring SA/SE must be aware of the dynamics of their customer's industry sector and the risks thereof.