This is your personal recruiting problem and has nothing to do with "all the best ops start as devs" statement that you made.
I have no idea how you could find true experienced sysadmins in your case. They exist though, that much I can tell you. I have 20 years of experience, I write bash, python, perl and lately mostly go. I am not a greybeard as I am just old enough to have been a junior for the greybeards that wrote linux kernel patches among other things to solve infra problems.
I mean how could I know which part of my comment you took issue with, I was describing my recruiting experience. I still stand by that statement though -- doesn't matter if they've been doing it for 2 years or 20 all the best ops people started on their path by being a dev who found themselves as the ops person of last resort and fell in love with it. The experience gained by being thrown into responsibility for a production system and having to figure it out in real time genuinely can't be beat.
If a company is having trouble recruiting, it normally means the package on offer just isn't competitive. Remote work and money are the big ones nowadays.
It might also mean your company is unattractive to engineers; location, negative reviews, difficult tech stack, business model based around clubbing baby puppies... Whatever it is.
I have led Ops teams in one shape or another for about 10 years. I second that having a junior dev do Ops work without supervision will not bring joy to your life, mostly because they do the darnedest things! One of the trainees here decided to remove a ControlTower guardrail from a root account, for a personal experiment in a sandbox; then three weeks later created a public S3 bucket in a production subaccount and leaked a bunch of data...
90% of developers just don't have the mindset for Ops work.
I have no idea how you could find true experienced sysadmins in your case. They exist though, that much I can tell you. I have 20 years of experience, I write bash, python, perl and lately mostly go. I am not a greybeard as I am just old enough to have been a junior for the greybeards that wrote linux kernel patches among other things to solve infra problems.