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 integral scale, and building something that truly matters for millions of people, every day. At Preply, the Data Platform team provides a single, trusted, and scalable data foundation for the whole company. The team ensures that all analytics, machine learning, and product features are built on unified, governed, and production-grade data assets in Preply's Lakehouse — including the extraction, normalization, and generation of structured data from Preply's unstructured assets, forming a durable data moat for AI-driven products.

The team owns end-to-end batch and streaming ingestion pipelines, data contracts and quality checks, enrichment and modeling across domains, and the self-service tooling that lets other teams onboard new data sources within clear guardrails. It works closely with ML Platform, Applied and Data Scientists, Analytics Engineering, Backend, and Product squads, so that datasets, features, and pipelines are production-ready, observable, and reusable across Preply. We've reached 90%+ adoption of AI coding tools across engineering, and we're now moving towards more autonomous, AI-Augmented development at scale.

As the Senior Engineering Manager for Data Platform, you'll own the engineering strategy, execution, and organizational health of the team that every analytics, ML, and AI initiative at Preply depends on. You'll go deep on data architecture, reliability, and platform abstractions, coach senior engineers, set operational standards, and partner with Data, ML, Product, Security, and Engineering leaders across the company. As a fast-growing company, we face a wide range of technical challenges, giving our engineers plenty of opportunities to grow and make an impact, some of which we even share on our Engineering Blog.

Please also visit our Tech Radar and our YouTube channel to learn more about the technologies we use at Preply! Lead and grow a high-performing data engineering team, fostering a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence. Define and drive the long-term vision for Preply's data foundation — the Lakehouse, ingestion layers, data contracts, enrichment ,



and governance — ensuring alignment with company objectives and the needs of analytics, ML, and product teams.

Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities, partner closely with Analytics, ML Platform, Data Science, and Product to ensure the team focuses on the datasets, pipelines, and tooling that deliver the greatest customer and business value. Translate strategy into realistic plans, balancing foundational platform investment with near-term needs of consuming teams while surfacing trade-offs and maintaining speed, quality, cost efficiency, and predictability. Provide technical leadership, guide architecture across batch and streaming ingestion, data modeling, quality, and governance; Own data reliability and trust.

Establish SLOs, observability, and incident response for data pipelines, moving the platform from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability management. Champion engineering best practices. Drive continuous improvements in code quality, operational excellence, development processes, and technology evolution.

Collaborate cross-functionally, work with stakeholders across the broader business to maximize impact and align on priorities, data ownership, standards, and outcomes. Own hiring quality, team composition, and operating model, evolving team boundaries as the platform and company needs change. What you need to succeed8+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management, with experience leading data or platform engineering teams.

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.

A track record of driving performance. Nice to haveHands-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. A generous monthly allowance for lessons , Learning & Development budget, and time off for your self-development;A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance and health insurance;We offer an attractive relocation package to join us in our Preply Barcelona HubAccess to free mental health support platforms;Keep perfecting - To create an outstanding customer experience, we focus on simplicity, smoothness, and enjoyment, continually perfecting it as every detail matters. Growth mindset - We proactively seek growth opportunities and believe today's best performance becomes tomorrow's starting point.

Raise the bar - We raise our performance standards continuously, alongside each new hire and promotion. Challenge, disagree and commit - We value open and candid communication, even when we don't fully agree. We believe that the presence of different opinions and viewpoints is a key ingredient for our success as a multicultural Ed-Tech company.

📌 Senior Engineering Manager (Data Platform) (Barcelona)
🏢 Preply
📍 Barcelona