Lead DevOps Engineer

• We are hiring for this position to be based in Dubai (UAE) or Eastern Europe
• Praktika is an AI-native education company on a mission to deliver efficient, engaging language learning to billions of people worldwide
• We're bridging the gap between traditional learning apps and human tutors through a fully automated tutorship experience powered by generative AI avatars
• Since launching our mobile apps in 2023, we've reached over 30 million learners and grown to over 2 million monthly active users, become one of the world's top-4 learning apps, and recently closed a $30M Series A to accelerate our roadmap
• We're a fully distributed team of ~50 people across 4 continents and 15+ countries, working asynchronously to ship fast and operate at a high bar
• We're hiring a Lead DevOps Engineer to own all of Praktika 's infrastructure and all access to it
• This is a hands-on role with real leadership: you'll set the direction for our infrastructure, build it, run it, and keep it secure, reliable, cost-efficient and fast as we grow
• You'll work with every engineering team and with non-engineering teams too
• We are rebuilding how the company works around AI, and infrastructure is where that has to be made safe
• What you'll do Own the infrastructure end to end: design, build and run our AWS-based infrastructure, and be the owner when it fails
• Own identity and access for the whole company: cloud accounts, vendors, internal tools, onboarding and offboarding
• Own infrastructure security (IAM, networks, secrets, audit logs) and the technical part of compliance: ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR
• Keep costs visible and under control across clouds and AI vendors
• Run the hosting and inference infrastructure for our ML and LLM models
• Close repeated operational requests with automation and self-service, not with tickets and manual console changes
• Rebuild infrastructure processes around AI: code review, monitoring and observability, alert triage, incident investigation
• Build the place where internal tools and apps, built with AI by engineers and non-engineers, are deployed safely, reviewed and monitored
• Build your own tools with AI too
• Give delivery teams golden paths (service templates, CI/CD, safe deploys, alerts) that make the standard way the easy way, without blocking teams
• What we're looking for We're looking for outstanding engineers who thrive in a challenging environment, bring a growth mindset, and operate with a high degree of agency, devotion, and autonomy
• Required Ownership mindset: you make decisions and finish work without supervision
• Deep hands-on AWS experience in production, including containers on ECS
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) as your normal way of working
• A solid security foundation and a real interest in security
• You have already built working tools with AI coding agents, and you use AI in your daily work
• You have changed how other teams work without formal authority over them
• You have set a technical direction and split large projects into deliverable parts
• Ability to thrive in an async, distributed, written-first culture
• Bonus DevSecOps experience and an understanding of how attacks work
• Hands-on work on SOC 2, ISO 27001 or GDPR
• Experience with clouds other than AWS
• Experience with infrastructure for ML / LLM inference
• Prior experience at an early-stage or high-growth consumer product company
• Our stack AWS (containers, serverless, managed databases, CDN), Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, SQL and NoSQL databases, event streaming, a data warehouse, hosted ML / LLM inference, and others
• How we work Mission-driven: we're building the #1 language learning app and competing to win
• AI-native: AI isn't a feature; it's how we think, build, and scale
• Extreme ownership: every project has a clear owner who drives it to success
• Less meetings, more outputs: async first; meetings are a last resort
• Speed & excellence: move fast without compromising quality
• Truly all-in: impactful work, full commitment, real rewards
• Data-driven: decisions are based on evidence, not opinion
• User-obsessed: if it doesn't improve the learner experience, it doesn't matter
• What we offer Room to grow: as you prove yourself, your scope can grow to Head of Platform (backend team)
• Equity that grows with your impact (stock options)
• 26 days of holiday plus bank holidays (34 days per year total)
• Annual company off-site (last year: Dubai)
• Health and wellness

benefits

• via SafetyWing
• Full AI toolkit access: Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other productivity tools. $1,000 annual education and learning budget
• Fully remote, based in Dubai or Eastern Europe
• Interview Process: Intro interview with our Head of Talent
• Technical interviews with our CTO
• Culture interview with a member of the leadership team
• Peer interview with an engineer from the team
• No take-home task
• We will provide you with feedback throughout the interview process
• Originally posted on Himalayas