- Location: Remote (India preferred) - Department: Product, Engineering & Data Science - Report to: Senior Director of Engineering About Us ELSA is a global leader in AI-powered English communication training, dedicated to transforming how people learn and speak English with confidence. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Francisco, we operate across the U.S., Vietnam, Portugal, Indonesia, Brazil and Japan. Powered by proprietary speech-recognition technology and generative AI, ELSA delivers real-time, hyper-personalized feedback to help learners improve pronunciation, fluency, and overall communication effectiveness. With over 50 million learners and 1 billion hours of anonymized speech data, ELSAs depth of language training intelligence is unmatched in the industry. Our B2B flagship platforms ELSA Enterprise and ELSA Schools empower organizations and educational institutions to elevate communication capabilities and unlock personal and professional opportunities for their people. We design engaging, bite-sized learning experiences that adapt to each learner's goals and context, ensuring measurable improvement and lasting confidence. Our vision is to become the global standard for real-time English communication training, enabling 1.5 billion language learners worldwide to speak clearly, be understood, and share their stories with the world. Backed by world-class investors including Googles Gradient Ventures, Monks Hill Ventures, and SOSV, ELSA has been recognized among the top global AI innovators: - Forbes Top 4 Companies Using AI to Transform the World - Research Sniper Top 5 Best AI Apps - ASU+GSV EdTech 150 - CB Insights Top 100 AI Companies Join us in shaping the future of language learning and empowering millions to unlock opportunity through confident communication. Role Summary We are looking for a Principal DevOps / SRE engineer to build and own our reliability practice end-to-end. This is not a firefighting role — our team already responds well to incidents. This person will formalize what works, automate what repeats, and build the foundation for enterprise-grade SRE as ELSA scales its B2B footprint. Key Responsibilities - Own the SRE practice: define severity tiers (P1–P4), formalize on-call rotation, build SLA tracking dashboards, and establish incident management workflows across a team of 4 DevOps engineers. - Build runbooks for the top recurring operational issues — pod scaling, deploy rollbacks, access management, EKS upgrades, CI/CD pipeline failures — and automate L1/L2 responses using tools like Shoreline.io, Rundeck, or PagerDuty automation. - Introduce and operationalize AI-assisted DevOps tooling: AIOps for alert correlation, CastAI/Kubecost for cost optimization, GitHub Copilot for IaC acceleration. Train the existing team on these tools. - Drive infrastructure modernization: EKS upgrades, Karpenter migration, observability (SigNoz/Prometheus), secrets management (ArgoCD/SOPS), and Terraform-based IaC maturity. - Collaborate with AI Engineering, Mobile, and B2B teams to ensure infrastructure supports real-time speech processing, GPU workloads, and multi-region enterprise deployments. - Design and plan round-the-clock SRE coverage model as B2B enterprise SLA commitments grow — evaluate vendor partnerships or strategic hires for Americas timezone coverage. What You Will Have - 2+ years in DevOps/SRE, with at least 2 years in a principal or staff-level role owning reliability practices for a production SaaS product. - Deep hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, EC2, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, Secrets Manager), Kubernetes (HPA, KEDA, Karpenter, pod scheduling, GPU workloads), and IaC (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD). - Track record of building runbooks, on-call rotations, and incident management frameworks — not just participating in them. - Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, SigNoz or Datadog), CI/CD (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions), and alerting (PagerDuty, Opsgenie). - Comfort working across timezones with distributed teams (India, Vietnam, Portugal). Strong written communication — you'll be writing runbooks, RCAs, and proposals as much as Terraform. Nice to Have - Experience with AI/ML infrastructure (GPU scheduling, model serving, real-time audio/speech workloads). - Familiarity with compliance frameworks (ISO 27001, SOC 2, Vanta) in a DevOps context. - Hands-on experience with AIOps tooling, automated remediation platforms (Shoreline, Rundeck), or FinOps tools (CastAI, Kubecost). What We Offer - Flexible work setup: Remote-first for Singapore, India, Indonesia, Malaysia; hybrid model for Vietnam. - Comprehensive employee well-being benefits. - Free ELSA Premium courses to polish your language skills - Collaborative, international team culture. - Opportunity to contribute to a fast-growing, well-funded Silicon Valley startup with global impact.

• Provide second-line technical support to hedge fund and financial services clients across the US and UK • Take ownership of complex issues and drive them through to resolution • Monitor client cloud infrastructure and trading systems using enterprise monitoring tools • Manage support tickets end-to-end using Jira Service Management • Deliver expert-level desktop troubleshooting across Windows 10/11 environments • Operate and support client Microsoft Azure environments • Configure and troubleshoot SSL VPN and IPsec VPN connections for remote client access • Collaborate with L3 engineers and senior operations staff on escalated issues

• Serve as the senior technical leader for the L1 and L2 Cloud Operations Engineers, providing day-to-day guidance, coaching, and knowledge transfer • Lead by example on complex incidents, walking junior engineers through advanced troubleshooting methodologies and resolution strategies • Define and maintain standard operating procedures, runbooks, and escalation workflows to ensure consistent and high-quality service delivery • Act as the technical point of contact during operational hours, overseeing ticket queues, prioritization, and SLA adherence across the team • Conduct internal training sessions and knowledge sharing on new technologies, processes, and client-specific environments • Identify skill gaps within the team and recommend training paths and certification goals to the Head of Managed Services • Serve as the highest-level technical escalation point within the service desk, resolving the most complex incidents spanning cloud, networking, security, and back-end infrastructure • Own and lead major incident processes end-to-end, including triage, communication, escalation to third parties, root cause analysis, and post-incident reviews • Perform advanced troubleshooting across multi-tenant Azure environments, hybrid infrastructure, and complex networking topologies • Document and track all escalations, major incidents, and problem records in Jira Service Management with thorough root cause analysis • Architect and manage complex Azure environments including Azure AD, Conditional Access, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Azure Networking (VNets, NSGs, ExpressRoute), and Azure Automation • Administer and optimize Office 365 tenants at an advanced level, including Exchange Online mail flow, hybrid configurations, security and compliance policies, and tenant-to-tenant migrations • Manage and troubleshoot Windows Server infrastructure (2016/2019/2022) at an advanced level, including Active Directory design, Group Policy architecture, DNS/DHCP, DFS, and Certificate Services • Oversee VMware ESXi and virtualization environments including capacity planning, performance optimization, host management, and migration strategies • Lead VDI environment management including Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, and thin client deployments at scale • Perform intermediate to advanced network troubleshooting and configuration across TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, VLANs, routing protocols, and WAN connectivity • Configure and manage Fortinet FortiGate firewalls including advanced policy management, SD-WAN, IPS/IDS, web filtering, and high-availability configurations • Manage Cisco Meraki environments on a scale, including complex wireless deployments, SD-WAN, switch stacking, and security appliance policies • Design, configure, and troubleshoot SSL VPN and IPsec VPN solutions across multiple client environments • Serve as the subject matter expert for advanced desktop and endpoint issues that cannot be resolved at L1/L2, including complex OS corruption, driver conflicts, and application compatibility • Design and optimize Intune/Endpoint Manager deployment strategies including Autopilot, compliance policies, and application packaging • Liaise directly with client stakeholders on escalated issues, service reviews, and change management activities • Collaborate with the account management teams on client escalations, service improvement plans, and quarterly business reviews • Design and implement automation solutions using PowerShell, Azure Automation, and other scripting tools to eliminate manual overhead and improve operational efficiency

• Providing technical leadership and architectural direction across all DevOps initiatives. • Establishing engineering standards for CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, observability, and DevSecOps practices. • Allocating DevOps resources across concurrent product initiatives based on priorities set by the Director of Product Development. • Conducting performance evaluations, career development planning, and technical mentorship. • Ensuring consistent operational excellence, reliability, security compliance, and automation maturity across environments. • Building scalable DevOps processes that enable autonomy within full-stack teams while maintaining governance and architectural alignment.