Senior Engineering Manager (Data Platform)

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!

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.

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. This is a leadership role for a manager with strong technical judgment. 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.

We've reached 90%+ adoption of AI coding tools across engineering, and are now moving towards more autonomous, AI-augmented development at scale. As an Engineering Manager, you’ll help your team adopt these ways of working while setting the right standards and guardrails.

Learn more about how we build on our Engineering Blog , Tech Radar , and YouTube channel !

What you'll be doing:

Lead and grow a high-performing data engineering team, fostering a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.

Coach and develop engineers, support them through regular feedback, mentorship, and career development, while creating an inclusive and collaborative team environment.

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.

Own execution and delivery. 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; help the team navigate trade-offs and remove technical obstacles.

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 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.