About the Role
We are hiring for a Lead DevOps Engineer based in Dubai (UAE) or Eastern Europe. The company 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, becoming one of the world’s top-4 learning apps. We recently closed a $30M Series A to accelerate our roadmap. Our distributed team of approximately 50 people spans 4 continents and 15+ countries, working asynchronously to ship fast and operate at a high bar.
You will own all of the company's infrastructure, setting direction, building, running, and securing it as we grow. This hands-on role involves collaborating with every engineering team and non-engineering teams to ensure our infrastructure is safe, reliable, cost-efficient, and fast as we rebuild how the company works around AI.
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What You'll Do
- Own the infrastructure end to end: design, build, and run our AWS-based infrastructure, and take responsibility when it fails.
- Manage identity and access for the company: cloud accounts, vendors, internal tools, onboarding, and offboarding.
- Ensure infrastructure security (IAM, networks, secrets, audit logs) and handle compliance elements: ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR.
- Maintain visibility and control of costs across clouds and AI vendors.
- Operate the hosting and inference infrastructure for our ML and large language model (LLM) models.
- Automate and provide self-service solutions to reduce repeated operational requests instead of manual console changes.
- Redesign infrastructure processes around AI: code review, monitoring and observability, alert triage, incident investigation.
- Create a safe environment for deploying, reviewing, and monitoring internal tools and apps built with AI by engineers and non-engineers.
- Provide delivery teams with standardized paths (service templates, CI/CD, safe deployments, alerts) to streamline operations without blocking progress.
What We’re Looking For
We seek outstanding engineers who thrive in challenging environments, bring a growth mindset, and operate with a high degree of agency, devotion, and autonomy.
Required
- An ownership mindset: capable of making decisions and completing work without supervision.
- Deep hands-on AWS experience in production, including containers on ECS.
- Proficiency in infrastructure as code (Terraform).
- Solid foundation in security and a genuine interest in security practices.
- Experience building tools with AI coding agents and utilizing AI in everyday tasks.
- Previous impact on team operations without formal authority.
- Established a technical direction and effectively split large projects into manageable parts.
- Ability to thrive in an asynchronous, distributed, written-first culture.
Bonus
- Experience in DevSecOps and an understanding of attack methodologies.
- Hands-on work with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR compliance.
- Familiarity with clouds other than AWS.
- Experience with infrastructure for ML/LLM inference.
- Previous involvement in 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, among others.
How We Work
- Mission-driven: building the #1 language learning app and competing to win.
- AI-native: incorporating AI into how we think, build, and scale.
- Extreme ownership: each project has a clear owner to drive success.
- Less meetings, more outputs: prioritize asynchronous communication; meetings are a last resort.
- Move fast with excellence: prioritize speed without compromising quality.
- True commitment: impactful work, full commitment, and genuine rewards.
- Data-driven: base decisions on evidence, not opinion.
- User-obsessed: prioritize improvements to the learner experience.
What We Offer
- Opportunities for growth: as you prove yourself, there is scope to advance to Head of Platform (backend team).
- Equity that grows with your impact (stock options).
- 26 days of holiday plus bank holidays (34 days total per year).
- Annual company off-site (last year: Dubai).
- Health and wellness benefits via SafetyWing.
- Access to a full AI toolkit: Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other productivity tools.
- $1,000 annual budget for education and learning.
- Fully remote position available, primarily in Dubai or Eastern Europe.
