> They are not very competitive for hiring people with your particular skillset.
There is plenty of ops talent willing to work at a high-profile startup. I have experience building and running PB-scale Ceph clusters, private and public clouds, HA infrastructure covering everything from DB failover to BGP, and interviewed at Gitlab when they announced going on-prem. I asked for half the market rate (because I was more interested in solving the scaling problem than money), but did not get it.
The HR person at the first (non-technical!) interview asked a bunch of programming related questions from a script which caught me completely off guard. One question went along the lines of "tell me about a difficult problem that you had a particularily elegant solution for". I think they've learned by now that ops problems usually can't be solved by a simple algorithm.
In retrospect I'm glad I didn't get it, but they seem to be having issues with more than infrastructure.
As a side note, if there are other startups wanting to move to own hardware but struggling to find the right people, I would love to know where to find you. Non-AWS ops jobs are far and few between these days.