It's notoriously hard to hire for. They cherrypick devs that are 85-99%[0] of the way to passing the Google SWE hiring bar, who in addition have ops experience.
The Google SRE head honcho says: [1]
>Fundamentally, it’s what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function.
So I think the short answer to your question is yes, they hire software devs and train them [2], but require them to already have some ops/Linux internals knowledge.
The Google SRE head honcho says: [1]
>Fundamentally, it’s what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations function.
So I think the short answer to your question is yes, they hire software devs and train them [2], but require them to already have some ops/Linux internals knowledge.
[0]: SRE Book
[1]: https://landing.google.com/sre/interview/ben-treynor.html
[2]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon15/program/presentat...