Principal Operations Specialist

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

• Own the capability that makes regional operations work: how a hub is bootstrapped, how it runs, and how every hub stays recognisably one Sand.
• Lead the expansion of hubs in the United States, the United Kingdom, East Africa and South Africa.
• Be the operational counterpart to our clients’ IT and security teams and to the account leads who own those relationships.
• 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 readiness criteria.
• 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.
• Operate the unified layer across all accounts: the tiered support model, published SLAs, reserved capacity, incident and problem management, and a single view of the operational health of every live client environment.
• Hire and develop hub leads and infrastructure engineers in each new region, maintaining a consistent hiring and quality bar across countries.
• Turn what the hubs learn into better global patterns, better platform feedback and better client commitments.

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.
• Experience in building an operations capability from zero.
• Familiarity with operating model fluency, tiered support, SLAs and SLOs, incident, problem and change management.
• Technical depth in Azure and AWS, networking, identity and access, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code (Pulumi, Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt or equivalents) and observability.
• Experience in regulated and sovereign environments, data residency, ISO 27001 and similar certifications.
• Client-facing competence with enterprise IT and executives.

Strong Pluses

• Experience in opening operations in a new country.
• Operating in Africa and other emerging markets alongside the US and UK.
• Experience with public sector, utility, health or other regulated operational environments.
• Operating ML models and LLM systems in production.

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.