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. At Praktika.ai we are on a mission to deliver efficient and engaging learning experiences for billions of people worldwide by bridging the gap between learning apps and human tutors. We have done this by creating a fully automated language tutorship experience powered by generative AI Avatars.