Independent of culture, learning to be strict enough in enforcing your own technical standards is something that does not come easily to everyone. It did not for me - I wanted people to come up with the right solution on their own - of course that means I sometimes won't agree with it. Usually that is fine, but more than once I let this slip into just being complacent about terrible code being written in my shop.

Also I don't know your personnel situation but if you are small you will be better served with a jack-of-all-trades with solid experience in sysadmin/devops as well as application development. If they run out of work to do after they have everything running well smooth, you could have them do some product work too.

If they never run out of work, they are not a very good sysadmin.This can be a little hard to find but by no means impossible.