What you need to succeed

• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management, with experience leading data or platform engineering teams.
• People-centric approach and team-building skills: a passion for building high-performing teams and helping people grow. You know how to create alignment, foster psychological safety, provide actionable feedback, and develop engineers through coaching and mentorship.
• Strong technical judgment and systems thinking. You are comfortable driving architectural discussions, evaluating technical trade-offs, championing engineering best practices, and partnering with senior engineers on technical strategy.
• A track record of hiring, coaching, and retaining high-performing teams, including senior engineers.
• Product & Business Partnership: You're comfortable working closely with Analytics, Data Science, ML, and Product partners to identify opportunities, prioritize investments, and drive measurable outcomes. You naturally connect data platform decisions to downstream user experience, business metrics, and company strategy.
• Clear communication and stakeholder leadership, with the ability to align teams with different incentives, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and revisit assumptions as the data ecosystem changes.
• Results-Oriented: A track record of driving performance. You know how to motivate teams to set and achieve ambitious, business-focused, and measurable goals.
• Ethical Leadership: You lead by example, serving as the team's moral compass by demonstrating empathy, transparency, accountability, and a strong sense of ownership. You value honesty and fairness, creating a culture where people feel safe to challenge ideas, learn, and grow.

Nice to have

• Hands-on familiarity with the modern data stack — for example, Spark, Flink, Kafka, Debezium, Airflow, dbt, or similar — and with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP or equivalent) and modern DevOps practices.
• Experience leading teams that built data platforms used by multiple teams in fast-growing companies.
• Experience running a data platform as a product: data contracts, self-service onboarding, discoverability, and measuring success through adoption and consumer outcomes.
• Experience with data governance, privacy, and compliance at ingestion time (classification, access control, masking, auditability).
• Familiarity with feature stores, ML data pipelines, or preparing data for GenAI / RAG use cases.
• AI Expertise: You use Agentic AI beyond code generation to support architecture, planning, and decision-making, while retaining human judgment for architecture, people decisions, business logic, and security, and establishing quality gates and safety nets for team workflows.

Why you’ll love it at Preply:

• An open, collaborative, dynamic, and diverse culture;
• A generous monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com, Learning & Development budget, and time off for your self-development;
• A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance and health insurance;
• Access to free mental health support platforms;
• Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centers throughout London to promote and support well-being and physical health;
• The opportunity to unlock the potential of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!).

Our Principles

• Care to change the world - We are passionate about our work and care deeply about its impact to be life changing.
• We do it for learners - For both Preply and tutors, learners are why we do what we do. Every day we focus on empowering tutors to deliver an exceptional learning experience.
• Keep perfecting - To create an outstanding customer experience, we focus on simplicity, smoothness, and enjoyment, continually perfecting it as every detail matters.
• Now is the time - In a fast-paced world, it matters how quickly we act. Now is the time to make great things happen.
• Disciplined execution - What makes us disciplined is the excellence in our execution. We set clear goals, focus on what matters, and utilize our resources efficiently.
• Dive deep - We leverage business acumen and curiosity to investigate disparities between numbers and stories, unlocking meaningful insights to guide our decisions.
• Growth mindset - We proactively seek growth opportunities and believe today's best performance becomes tomorrow's starting point. We humbly embrace feedback and learn from setbacks.
• Raise the bar - We raise our performance standards continuously, alongside each new hire and promotion. We build diverse and high-performing teams that can make a real difference.
• Challenge, disagree and commit - We value open and candid communication, even when we don’t fully agree. We speak our minds, challenge when necessary, and fully commit to decisions once made.
• One Preply - We prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and the success of our team over personal ambitions. Together, we support and celebrate each other's progress.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Preply.com is committed to creating an inclusive environment where people of diverse backgrounds can thrive. We believe that the presence of different opinions and viewpoints is a key ingredient for our success as a multicultural Ed-Tech company. That means that Preply will consider all applications for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or veteran status.