WRX always says about what I say to this kind of question since we are both engineers turned pilot. If you have no flight ratings now, you should take the desk job for a few years while you garner ratings and pay training bills. You may find that the desk work stimulates you anyway, a minority of private pilot- engineers find that they cannot live without 55 hours a week of code writing or whatever engineering task they fall in love with. I have known more than a few private pilot engineers who simply loved coding, making AFMs and so on. A few even made the jump to flying and then backtracked when they realized flying is not all fun, money, and adventure. Engineering desk jobs are the better jobs in terms of quality of life, stability, risk, pay and retirement income hands down, so make sure you cannot stand that first.
Now for the question of whether engineering desk jobs are really all they are cracked up to be. We have long debates here about this, a user named Hindsight2020 comes to mind, who argues the desk life is not really worth it. It depends is my position. If you like being home a lot, really enjoy spiffy cars and big homes, like the family life, and are satisfied with a weekend trip in a 182 once a month then you are a desk worker by nature- live long and prosper. But there is a group like myself who simply cannot go to the same desk eternally and for us, the hardships of pro flying (and you better better there are some) are not only worth it, flying is really the only thing we have any hope of being satisfied with even having tried engineering in many forms.
I started in aerospace CAD modeling as a Catia driver, then gravitated to flight test desk work as my pilot credentials progressed, arrived at a dead end with that because almost no flight test engineers get to test the airplanes, and then accepted various entry level flying gigs such as aerial surveys, Part 135, Part 121 regional flying, as well as lots of flight instruction and various odd flying jobs. Of all those jobs, the Part 135 was the most interesting being a single pilot IFR gig. But that's just me. I have seen people absolutely eat up regional airline flying, and seen others get totally disgusted with the very same thing- you do not know until you try.