Back-end Engineer

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.

• Shape technical strategy & drive execution. Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to define and co-own the tribe’s engineering strategy and technical roadmap. Lead end-to-end strategic initiatives, from ideation to delivery, translating product vision into clear technical execution, aligning scope, milestones, and delivering measurable outcomes iteratively.
• Lead architecture & platform evolution. Act as a key architect for the future state of our systems. Evolve core services into a scalable, reliable platform by defining target architectures, driving migrations and deprecations, and ensuring technical excellence across performance, availability, and cost efficiency, always balancing long-term vision with pragmatism.
• Raise engineering excellence & developer experience. Continuously improve how we build. Identify bottlenecks, reduce friction, and drive initiatives that increase team productivity. Champion high engineering standards through RFCs, post-mortems, and quality frameworks (instrumentation, evaluations), ensuring we build the right things in the right way.
• Operate as a multiplier. Extend your impact beyond your own work. Mentor and influence Senior Engineers, Tech Leads, and Engineering Managers, contribute to hiring, and elevate the overall technical bar. Stay hands-on for the most complex and high-impact challenges, leading by example where it matters most.
• Drive technical decision-making. Own critical technical and strategic decisions, including build-vs-buy trade-offs. Lead tooling and vendor evaluations with a clear understanding of total cost of ownership, ensuring decisions align with both technical needs and business goals.

• Strong engineering foundations & system thinking. You have a solid background in software engineering and architecture, with experience designing and evolving large-scale systems. You’re able to derive technical strategy from business goals and understand how APIs, services, and data flows translate into real user impact.
• Hands-on, strategic mindset. You connect high-level strategy with execution. You’re comfortable diving into code, building proofs of concept, and iterating quickly with teams to validate ideas.
• End-to-end ownership. You take ownership from ambiguous problem definition through to delivery, launch, and operational stability, with a clear focus on measurable outcomes.
• Ability to influence and align. You’re an excellent communicator, able to articulate technical vision, trade-offs, and business value to engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders. You influence without relying on formal authority and help align multiple teams toward shared goals.
• Product-minded engineering. You approach engineering with a strong product lens - making thoughtful trade-offs and connecting technical decisions to user experience and business impact.
• Comfort operating across domains. You’re able to move fluidly between different types of work - new feature development, system design, architecture evolution, migrations, and process improvements.
• Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills. You’re analytical and creative in your approach, able to explore multiple solutions, evaluate trade-offs, and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.
• Driving engineering excellence. You have experience raising the bar across teams — mentoring senior engineers, influencing tech leads, contributing to hiring, and shaping engineering culture through practices like RFCs, post-mortems, and quality frameworks.
• Comfort in evolving environments. You thrive in environments that are changing and growing, and are able to adapt as priorities and context evolve.
• AI Expertise: You're a forefront user of Agentic AI. You're able to bring hands on experience and start influencing the team beyond code generation; reserving judgment for architecture, business logic, and security, using AI as a thought partner and able to set up quality gates and safety nets to enhance existing engineering workflows and propose AI-native alternatives.