Not special interviews, but certainly different pieces of headcount. There are Googlers and there are Googlers. Being the second is a lot more work, but a lot more interesting.
Some people directly join sexy teams, but that probably means they have some accomplishments from before, the hard part is getting a foot in that door and the unsexy infrastructure teams are a great place to start since there are tons of problems to solve there and not much competition for that kind of work. Most people just want to work with data models or publicly visible products, not the invisible services that moves millions of requests per second, but anything that moves millions of requests per second will be easy to have impact with.