It's a different beast, for sure. My primary role is the resident Ansible/terraform guy. There's overlap but it's less about knowing the best algorithms and more about being able to piece together a broad swath of disparate parts. There's a significant amount of figure-it-out-make-it-happen, which I enjoy.

I knew the tools, because in the course of learning I had to build projects end to end and managing stuff manually while also working on the code was just not on.

While knowing both of those definitely made a lot of interviewers perk up a bit, I think what really lubricated the process was that I had focused really wide - I had entry -level competency in a ton of stuff so it was easier to find a good fit.

I guess the takeaway is to learn a little bit of a lot rather than a lot of a few things. That will also be helpful after you specialize, because it's never a bad thing to know how your systems interconnect.