Sand Tech Holdings Limited - Principal Operations Specialist
Requirements
• 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. • 10+ years • 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. • You have built an operations capability from zero. • 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. • Operating model fluency. • 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. • Enough technical depth to be trusted by engineers. • 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. • Regulated and sovereign environments. • 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. • Matrix and multi-country leadership. • 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. • Commercial awareness. • 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. • Client-facing competence with enterprise IT and executives. • 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 • 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. • This is a remote position, but will require some travel. • 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.
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. • Client operations interface. • 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. • Hub blueprint. • 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. • Bootstrapping. • 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. • Running Client Value Ops. • 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. • Leading through a matrix • 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. • People and bar • 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. • Closing the loop. • 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.
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