Sorry for the late response. I think it very much depends on the team that you're on and if you have good technical mentorship or not. For me it was very challenging - I had to pick up a brand new set of skills, and the on call hours were brutal because the infrastructure would have issues in the middle of the night.

This diminishes and matures over time if you have good leadership, though.

If you're interested in DevOps, you really need to have a solid linux foundation, and the rest is learning how to automate cloud infrastructure.

It helps to have experience with software engineering, but not necessarily required. The work flow will be similar if you follow typical Agile development processes at the place you work.