Staff Platform Engineer

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.

Meet the Team

At Preply, we build scalable and reliable applications using Python/Django, with a strong focus on data, A/B testing, and feedback from students and tutors to guide our decisions. We prioritize product quality through robust monitoring, metrics analysis, and continuous optimization. Thanks to our advanced CI/CD processes, we run 100+ successful production deployments every business day.

Our Platform Tribe builds and operates the internal products that make it simple, safe, fast, and reliable for engineers to deliver value. The platform is designed around opinionated, well-supported paved paths, self-service by default, and guardrails over gates.

We are looking for a Staff Platform Engineer to be a high-leverage technical leader across the Platform Tribe. You will work across platform squads - Infrastructure, Runtime and Data, Developer Platform, Application Platform, Frontend Platform, Backend Platform - to set technical direction, unblock complex problems, raise the quality bar through mentorship, and ship production changes hands-on.

This role combines technical leadership with hands-on execution. Success is measured by durable improvements in platform capabilities and reliability, not by producing designs in isolation or serving as a centralized support function.

We’ve reached 90%+ adoption of AI coding tools across engineering, and we’re now moving towards more autonomous, AI-Augmented development at scale. At Preply, engineers have direct access to the best tools available, with the freedom to use them fully and experiment as they build.

We have diverse technical challenges that will allow you to develop your skills across the stack - sometimes we write about them in our Engineering Blog! Please, also visit our Tech Radar and our YouTube channel to learn more about the technologies we use at Preply!

What you’ll be doing:

• Provide technical leadership across platform squads: architecture decisions, engineering standards, paved paths, and reusable patterns that reduce cognitive load and increase consistency.
• Lead cross-squad and cross-engineering initiatives that improve the path from code to production: CI foundations, delivery workflow reliability, environments, and self-service entry points.
• Drive operability improvements: SLO thinking, dashboards, alerting standards, runbooks, failure recovery patterns, and incident readiness across platform-owned systems.
• Go deep on high-impact reliability and performance problems, including root cause analysis, remediation design, automation to prevent recurrence, and postmortem follow-through.
• Build and operate critical platform services and tooling that serve production traffic and internal users, with strong engineering quality and operational discipline.
• Act as a multiplier through mentorship: coaching senior engineers and tech leads, improving design quality, and raising execution standards across the tribe.
• Use data to guide priorities and measure outcomes (delivery health, reliability signals, adoption, and satisfaction), and help teams turn metrics into durable improvements.
• Participate in on-call and major incident response, leading by example and helping teams improve incident execution and prevention over time.

What you need to succeed

• Strong track record as a senior technical leader (Staff, Principal, or equivalent) delivering cross-team impact: setting standards, aligning stakeholders, de-risking complex technical decisions, and landing changes in production.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, maintaining, and troubleshooting high-traffic distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience with DevOps and cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS): networking basics, identity and access patterns, infrastructure automation, and operational best practices.
• Experience with CI/CD systems, build and test reliability, artifact management, and developer workflows.
• Strong foundations in reliability engineering: observability, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and automation-driven prevention.
• Communication and technical influence - articulates complex tradeoffs clearly, drives alignment through RFCs, and influences technical direction across teams.
• Comfort writing production-quality tooling through AI-assisted coding.

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 shape the lives of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!).