Principal Operations Specialist

Sand Technologies; South Africa; Remote; ZAR 1,200,000 - 2,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Sand Technologies is seeking a Principal Operations Specialist to design and sustain regional operational systems powering our physical AI solutions. You will drive hub bootstrapping, on-call design, and unified client operations across markets, working with GRC, IT Operations and Platform teams.

The role requires 10+ years delivering multi-country infrastructure and strong leadership in a regulated environment.

Qualifications

• Over 10 years in infrastructure, cloud operations or technology ops.
• Experience building operations from zero and leading multi-country teams.
• Fluent with ITIL/SRE practices, SLAs, and multi-region delivery.
• Deep technical depth in cloud, networking, identity, Kubernetes and IaC.
• Experience with regulated or sovereign environments is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own regional operational systems, processes and capability for Sand's physical AI platforms.
• Lead hub bootstrapping, running, and governance across markets (US, UK, Africa, SA).
• Partner with Legal, IT Ops and Platform teams to standardize global operations.
• Define runbooks, on-call design, security baselines and production criteria.
• Hire, onboard and develop hub leads and engineers across regions.
• Turn hub learnings into global patterns and improved client commitments.

Skills

Infrastructure leadership

SRE

Cloud operations

ITIL

SRE practice

Azure

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

OpenTofu

Tools

Pulumi

Terraform

OpenTofu

Terragrunt

Job description

About Sand

Sand Technologies is a global Physical AI company using data and AI to make critical industries work better. We partner with governments, cities and enterprises to improve how essential systems operate across healthcare, water, energy, telecommunications and infrastructure.

Our work delivers proven real-world impact. We have built AI systems that help manage London's water supply, supported telecom network planning across hundreds of cities, and developed digital healthcare platforms serving tens of millions of people across Africa. From intelligent command centers to AI-powered infrastructure platforms, we help organizations sense, analyze and act in complex environments.

Our people are ambitious, curious and relentlessly practical. Our teams work alongside clients in the field, solving hard problems and deploying solutions that last. With colleagues across Africa, Europe, the UK and the US, we operate across the full stack - from research and engineering to deployment and capability building.

Our mission is simple: to harness AI to solve humanity's most pressing challenges.

About the role

We are transitioning toward a structure focused on centralized enablement combined with regional infrastructure deployment and operations. Under this framework, a core global team establishes overarching standards, operational patterns, and governance guardrails. Dedicated Client Infrastructure Hubs across each market actively provision, maintain, and manage sustained regional platforms for local clients. Operating as long-term functional units rather than transient delivery groups, these hubs pull expertise directly from Delivery Enablement, IT Operations, along with GRC and Cyber Security. Unifying these efforts, our Client Value Ops layer serves as the unified operational interface across all client engagements globally.

We are seeking an experienced Principal Operations Specialist to join our global enablement team. As a principal contributor, you will be responsible for designing and establishing the regional operational systems, processes and capability that operates and maintains the infrastructure that powers our physical AI solutions.

Responsibilities

As a member of the global enablement team you will own the capability that makes regional operations work: how a hub is bootstrapped, how it runs, and how every hub stays recognisably one Sand. Hubs are live or launching in the United States, the United Kingdom, East Africa and South Africa, with further regions planned for 2027. You will lead that expansion end to end:

• Client operations interface. Be the operational counterpart to our clients' IT and security teams and to the account leads who own those relationships. Shape the support, residency and response commitments we make in proposals so a hub can keep them, and own how each client environment moves from delivery into regional operation.
• Hub blueprint. Define the repeatable pattern for standing up a hub: roles and skills, access and privilege model, tooling, runbooks, on-call design, security and compliance baseline, and the readiness criteria that say a hub can take a client into production. The fourth hub should be faster and safer to launch than the first.
• Bootstrapping. Lead each new hub from a business case with regional sponsors, through hiring and onboarding its first people, to the first client environment in production with a named owner.
• Running Client Value Ops. Operate the unified layer across all accounts: the tiered support model, published SLAs, reserved capacity, incident and problem management, cross-region escalation, and a single view of the operational health of every live client environment.
• Leading through a matrix. You set the operating standard, the cadence and the bar, and you make the hub work as one team without owning every line. You will partner closely with Legal (GRC and Cyber Security) on data residency and certification, with IT Operations on regional corporate infrastructure, and with the Platform team on how Symmetri is operated in the field.
• People and bar. Hire and develop hub leads and infrastructure engineers in each new region, and hold a consistent hiring and quality bar across countries with very different talent markets.
• Closing the loop. Turn what the hubs learn into better global patterns, better platform feedback and better client commitments, so operational reality shapes what we build and sell rather than surprising us after the fact.

You will spend real time in front of clients. A utility CIO, a ministry's security team or a regulator will ask who operates their systems, from where, with what access, and what happens at 2am when something breaks. You will be the person who can answer that accurately for any region, and who designed the answer.

As Symmetri becomes the standard way we deliver, the line between deploying the platform and operating it for clients narrows. You will be expected to see that coming and shape a hub model that scales with it rather than around it.

Your First Twelve Months

• A hub blueprint exists, is in use, and a hub lead in a new region (or their agent) could follow it without you in the room.
• Every live hub has a named lead, published SLAs, tuned monitoring, accurate runbooks, and an on-call rota that does not depend on any single person.
• Client Value Ops gives one view of the operational health of every live client environment, across every hub.
• Our US and Africa hubs have an agreed business case, SLO sponsors, and a service assurance backbone you would stake your name on.
• You can say, with evidence, what must be identical in every hub and what must deliberately differ by region: regulation, data residency, labour markets, client expectations.
• You have been the operational voice in at least one client security review or audit, and the answer held up.

Requirements - Essential

• 10+ years in infrastructure, cloud operations, site reliability or technology operations, with at least four of those leading operational teams across more than one country or time zone.
• You have built an operations capability from zero. At least once, you have stood up an SRE function, an operations centre, a managed service or a regional support team, taken it live, and left it running without you.
• Operating model fluency. Tiered support, SLAs and SLOs, incident, problem and change management, reserved capacity, and on-call design that is sustainable rather than heroic. Literate in ITIL and SRE practice without being bound by either.
• Enough technical depth to be trusted by engineers. Azure and AWS, networking, identity and access, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (Pulumi, Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt or equivalents) and observability. You will not be in a terminal every day, but you can judge a design, read an incident timeline, and spot the risk an engineer has not mentioned.
• Regulated and sovereign environments. Data residency, ISO 27001 and similar certifications, client security questionnaires and audits, and what "where do your support personnel sit" really means to a public sector client.
• Matrix and multi-country leadership. You have hired, onboarded and led people in more than one country, including people who did not report to you, and built a shared standard anyway.
• Commercial awareness. You can size a hub, cost reserved capacity, and build a business case that a regional sponsor and a CFO will both accept.
• Client-facing competence with enterprise IT and executives. You can represent a commitment to a client's IT leadership, security team or board without over-promising, and be trusted when you say no.

You will not be equally strong across all of these. Strong in most, familiar with the rest, unafraid of learning fast while being aware of and drawing in support for your current limitations.

Strong Pluses

• Experience in opening operations in a new country: entity, employment and hiring realities on the ground
• Operating in Africa and other emerging markets alongside the US and UK
• Public sector, utility, health or other regulated operational environments
• Air-gapped, sovereign or disconnected deployments of data-intensive systems
• Follow-the-sun or 24/7 operations design
• Operating ML models and LLM systems in production, and using agents to run operations

Location

The existing delivery enablement team members are based in Johannesburg and Cape Town. To maximise in-person collaboration time we have a preference for hiring in these cities, in that order. Exceptionally strong candidates based in other locations will be considered.

This is a remote position, but will require some travel. This role requires global travel to client sites during the early stages of establishing hubs.

Due to the considerable amount of virtual work and interaction with colleagues and customers, especially within the EMEA region, it is essential that the successful applicant has the drive and ethic to succeed in working in small teams physically but in larger efforts virtually. Self-drive to communicate constantly using web collaboration and video conferencing is essential.