While I'm not in a DevOps position, nor have I been in one. The people I've met who were, primarily focused on providing value and automating repetitive work.
This usually took the form of creating tooling or instrumentation that made everyone else's jobs easier or reliable (eliminating human error).
While that is easier said than done, the tooling they created needed to be rock solid, and there are certain operation aspects that are often overlooked because Operations rarely has as much input as Developers in more classical teams. As long as it continues running without problems few people care.
Volume 2 of TPOSNA for Cloud breaks some of these operational requirements down. I'd also add, its important to understand and know the limitations of computation, and maybe a little compiler/automata theory on the types of problems and what leads to halting/undecidability.
In that kind of position, you will often be dealing with automation; and you may need to be able to verify requirements of computation such as if a output interface is injecting non-determinism into subsequent forked processes. Any automation after that will fail in unpredictable ways, and it happens in a lot of places (take a close look at ldd coreutils output sometime).
There are a few core requirements that programs assume are true, but then break down when those assumptions stop being true. Having an implicit knowledge of System's and Signals is very valuable with this in mind as those properties can be tested; and effective troubleshooting only works when certain properties are present allowing you to characterize problem classes quickly and allocate/provide estimates of time more effectively. Non-deterministic type problems take exponentially longer since you can only guess and check.
As for certifications, if you want a background in System Administration RHCSA was good; I haven't seen it since they were acquired by IBM.
You should look at the person who issues the certifications and see how long or how they validate those certifications. With deprecated certifications, they often stop validating whether its been issued so its as though you didn't have any certification.