Principal Operations Specialist

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in South Africa.

📋 Description

• Design and implement regional operational systems, processes, and capabilities for infrastructure that supports physical AI solutions.

• Serve as the operational liaison to clients’ IT and security teams as well as account leads.

• Develop support, residency, and response commitments within proposals.

• Oversee transitions from delivery into regional operations.

• Define the consistent hub blueprint, which includes roles, skills, access, tooling, runbooks, on-call responsibilities, security, compliance, and readiness criteria.

• Lead the establishment of new hubs from the business case stage through hiring, onboarding, and the initial client production environment.

• Manage Client Value Operations across accounts, including tiered support, SLAs, reserved capacity, incident and problem management, cross-region escalation, and operational health reporting.

• Establish operating standards, cadence, and quality benchmarks across a matrix organization.

• Collaborate with Legal, GRC, Cyber Security, IT Operations, and Platform teams.

• Recruit and mentor hub leads and infrastructure engineers across new regions.

• Transform hub insights into enhanced global patterns, platform feedback, and client commitments.

• Engage in client security reviews and audits.

• Develop a scalable hub model as Symmetri evolves into the standard delivery platform.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in infrastructure, cloud operations, site reliability, or technology operations.

• At least four years of experience leading operational teams across multiple countries or time zones.

• Proven track record of building operational capabilities from the ground up, including establishing an SRE function, operations center, managed service, or regional support team.

• Proficient in tiered support, SLAs and SLOs, incident, problem, and change management, reserved capacity, and sustainable on-call design.

• Knowledgeable in ITIL and SRE practices.

• Technical expertise in Azure, AWS, networking, identity and access management, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and observability.

• Familiarity with Pulumi, Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, or similar tools.

• Experience with data residency, ISO 27001, and related certifications, as well as client security questionnaires and audits.

• Background in hiring, onboarding, and leading personnel in multiple countries, including individuals who did not report directly to you.

• Capability to size a hub, estimate reserved capacity costs, and formulate a business case.

• Strong client-facing skills with enterprise IT and executives.

• Additional advantages: experience launching operations in a new country; working in Africa, the US, and the UK; navigating regulated environments; managing air-gapped or sovereign deployments; implementing follow-the-sun or 24/7 operations; operating ML models and LLM systems in production.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible remote position.

• Opportunities for global travel to client sites.

• Preference for in-person collaboration in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

• Chance to work with global colleagues across Africa, Europe, the UK, and the US.