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

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Own the infrastructure end to end: design, build and run our AWS-based infrastructure, and be the owner when it fails.

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Own identity and access for the whole company: cloud accounts, vendors, internal tools, onboarding and offboarding.

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Own infrastructure security (IAM, networks, secrets, audit logs) and the technical part of compliance: ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR.

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Keep costs visible and under control across clouds and AI vendors.

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Run the hosting and inference infrastructure for our ML and LLM models.

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Close repeated operational requests with automation and self-service, not with tickets and manual console changes.

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Rebuild infrastructure processes around AI: code review, monitoring and observability, alert triage, incident investigation.

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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.

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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

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Ownership mindset: you make decisions and finish work without supervision.

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Deep hands-on AWS experience in production, including containers on ECS.

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Infrastructure as code (Terraform) as your normal way of working.

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A solid security foundation and a real interest in security.

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You have already built working tools with AI coding agents, and you use AI in your daily work.

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You have changed how other teams work without formal authority over them.

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You have set a technical direction and split large projects into deliverable parts.

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Ability to thrive in an async, distributed, written-first culture.

Bonus

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DevSecOps experience and an understanding of how attacks work.

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Hands-on work on SOC 2, ISO 27001 or GDPR.

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Experience with clouds other than AWS.

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Experience with infrastructure for ML / LLM inference.

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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

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Mission-driven: we're building the #1 language learning app and competing to win.

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AI-native: AI isn't a feature; it's how we think, build, and scale.

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Extreme ownership: every project has a clear owner who drives it to success.

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Less meetings, more outputs: async first; meetings are a last resort.

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Speed & excellence: move fast without compromising quality.

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Truly all-in: impactful work, full commitment, real rewards.

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Data-driven: decisions are based on evidence, not opinion.

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User-obsessed: if it doesn't improve the learner experience, it doesn't matter.

What we offer

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Room to grow: as you prove yourself, your scope can grow to Head of Platform (backend team).

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Equity that grows with your impact (stock options).

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26 days of holiday plus bank holidays (34 days per year total).

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Annual company off-site (last year: Dubai).

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Health and wellness benefits via SafetyWing.

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Full AI toolkit access: Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other productivity tools.

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$1,000 annual education and learning budget.

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Fully remote, based in Dubai or Eastern Europe.

Interview Process:

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Intro interview with our Head of Talent.

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Technical interviews with our CTO.

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Culture interview with a member of the leadership team.

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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