Senior Platform Software Engineer - R&D Automation in London

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! The Platform Tribe builds and operates the platform that Preply engineers develop and deploy on, and that millions of learners and tutors rely on every day. Our platform handles over 20bln requests per month, and we combine software engineering, distributed systems and cloud infrastructure to keep it reliable at scale while making it faster and easier for engineering teams to build on top of it.

As part of the R&D Automation team, you’ll focus on:

• Agentic software development: building AI agents that automate and augment workflows across the entire software development lifecycle.
• AI platforms and capabilities: creating reusable foundations, tools and integrations that allow agents to interact effectively with our codebases, engineering systems and internal knowledge.
• Experimentation at speed: rapidly prototyping new approaches, measuring their effectiveness and scaling the ones that create meaningful value.
• Safe and reliable automation: designing the right verification, context and human-in-the-loop mechanisms so agentic workflows can be adopted with confidence.

We work in small teams with significant ownership, so you’ll have a real say in architecture, technical decisions and how our platform evolves. We have diverse technical challenges that will allow you to develop your skills across the stack.

What you’ll be doing: The Senior Platform Software Engineer in the R&D Automation team, you’ll combine strong backend software engineering with hands-on AI expertise to build agentic systems that change how software is developed at Preply.

• Design and build AI agents and the harness that power them using Python.
• Build reusable agent capabilities, tools and integrations that connect AI systems with our engineering ecosystem and internal knowledge.
• Develop agentic workflows across Engineering, Product, Design and Data, including coding, testing and code review, and across the broader software development lifecycle.
• Experiment rapidly with new AI capabilities, taking ideas from proof of concept through validation and scalable adoption.
• Design effective context, orchestration and verification mechanisms for reliable agentic workflows.
• Measure how agents are used and the value they create, using data and feedback to continuously improve them.
• Make thoughtful decisions about where AI can add value, where human judgment remains essential, and how the two should work together.
• Collaborate closely with engineers, designers, product, and data teams across Preply to understand their workflows, drive adoption and identify new opportunities for automation.

What you need to succeed:

• Extensive experience (~8 years) designing and building complex backend software systems.
• Strong software engineering skills with production experience using Python.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents, agentic workflows or platforms that enable others to build and use AI-powered capabilities.
• Strong understanding of modern agentic AI patterns, including context management, tool use, orchestration and evaluation/verification.
• Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, MCPs, internal tools, codebases and other engineering systems.
• Experience taking new technical ideas from experimentation or proof of concept into robust, scalable solutions.
• A strong experimentation mindset: comfortable working with ambiguity, iterating quickly and using data and feedback to determine what works.
• Good understanding of distributed systems and the backend architecture required to operate AI-powered systems reliably.
• Strong product thinking, with the ability to understand user workflows and connect technical solutions to measurable outcomes.
• Strong communication skills. Minimum C1 English level.

Why you’ll love it at Preply:

• Open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture.
• Generous monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com.
• Learning & Development budget, including time off for your self-development.
• Competitive financial package with equity, and leave allowance.
• Opportunity to shape the lives of learners and tutors from over 175 countries through language learning and teaching.

Our Principles:

• Care to change the world - We are passionate about our work and care deeply about its impact to be life changing.
• We do it for learners - For both Preply and tutors, learners are why we do what we do. Every day we focus on empowering tutors to deliver an exceptional learning experience.
• Keep perfecting - To create an outstanding customer experience, we focus on simplicity, smoothness, and enjoyment, continually perfecting it as every detail matters.
• Now is the time - In a fast-paced world, it matters how quickly we act. Now is the time to make great things happen.
• Disciplined execution - What makes us disciplined is the excellence in our execution. We set clear goals, focus on what matters, and utilize our resources efficiently.
• Dive deep - We leverage business acumen and curiosity to investigate disparities between numbers and stories, unlocking meaningful insights to guide our decisions.
• Growth mindset - We proactively seek growth opportunities and believe today's best performance becomes tomorrow's starting point. We humbly embrace feedback and learn from setbacks.
• Raise the bar - We raise our performance standards continuously, alongside each new hire and promotion. We build diverse and high-performing teams that can make a real difference.
• Challenge, disagree and commit - We value open and candid communication, even when we don’t fully agree. We speak our minds, challenge when necessary, and fully commit to decisions once made.
• One Preply - We prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and the success of our team over personal ambitions. Together, we support and celebrate each other's progress.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Preply.com is committed to creating an inclusive environment where people of diverse backgrounds can thrive. We believe that the presence of different opinions and viewpoints is a key ingredient for our success as a multicultural Ed-Tech company. That means that Preply will consider all applications for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age or veteran status.