Staff Back-end Engineer

We power people’s progress.

At Preply, we’re all about creating life-changing learning experiences. We help people discover the magic of the perfect tutor, craft a personalised learning journey, and stay motivated to keep growing. Our approach is human-led, tech-enabled - and it’s creating real impact.

We’ve just reached unicorn status with a $150M Series D, accelerating our vision to transform education through human-led, AI-enhanced learning. Today, 100,000+ tutors teach 90+ languages to learners in 180 countries - and we’re only getting started. As a category-defining company, we’re shaping what the future of learning looks like at global scale.

Every Preply lesson sparks change, fuels ambition, and drives progress that matters. Joining Preply means helping define the future of education at global scale, and building something that truly matters for millions of people, every day.

Meet the team!

We’re on a mission to transform lives through learning. In our Learning Teams, that means building the next generation of personalized, AI-enabled, media-rich experiences for learners and tutors around the world. If you care deeply about impact, quality, technology and culture – this is your chance to lead a part of it.

As a Staff Engineer in the Learning Teams, you will lead some of the most complex and strategic engineering initiatives at Preply. You will define and drive technical roadmaps and architecture, collaborate across product, engineering and business stakeholders, and influence our platform at scale. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad scope and strong impact – you will help shape how we build, ship and evolve our learning experiences globally.

What you’ll be doing

• Shape, drive, and co-own the Learning Teams’s engineering strategy and own technical roadmap, partnering with Engineering and Product Leadership s to align initiatives, priorities and dependencies.
• Lead end-to-end strategic initiatives and innovations, translating high-level product vision into technical execution, align scope and milestones and ship iteratively with measurable outcomes.
• Evolve architecture and core services into a scalable, reliable platform, defining target states, drive deprecations and migrations, and uphold technical excellence (availability, performance, cost).
• Raise engineering practices and developer experience, driving RFCs, post-mortems, quality frameworks (evaluations, instrumentation), identifying bottlenecks and driving initiatives that reduce toil and increase productivity across team
• Operate as a multiplier: mentor and influence senior engineers, Tech Leads, EMs, and hiring panels; stay hands-on for the hardest, most impactful work.
• Make build-vs-buy and vendor/tooling calls with a clear view of total cost of ownership; lead evaluations and participate in negotiations.

What you'll bring

• Strong foundation in software engineering and architecture; comfortable designing and evolving large-scale systems and deriving technical strategy from business objectives.
• Proficiency across the full stack, from frontend frameworks and mobile clients to backend systems, APIs, and data flows, with a focus on cohesive end-to-end experiences.
• Hands-on technical expertise, comfortable diving deep into code, building proofs-of-concept, and iterating quickly with teams to validate technical approaches.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, able to articulate technical vision, trade-offs, and business value to both engineering, product and executive stakeholders. Able to influence without formal authority.
• Proven track record of taking ownership end-to-end, from defining scope, through delivery, launch, and operational stability.
• Analytical and creative problem-solving skills, able to explore multiple implementation paths, evaluate trade-offs, and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.
• Ability to operate across domains, new feature development, architecture evolution, system migrations, process improvement – all matters.
• Proven experience driving engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, influencing tech leads, leading hiring for key roles, establishing and evangelising RFCs, post-mortems, etc.

• Experience or strong interest in one or more of these domains: AI/ML, media/video platforms, large-scale system migrations, cost optimisation, data infrastructure, QA/test-automation at scale.

   

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;
• The opportunity to unlock the potential of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!)