Lead DevOps Engineer

Location: London, United Kingdom; Dubai, United Arab Emirates Workplace: fully 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.