Staff Back-end Engineer 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 personalized learning journey, and stay motivated to keep growing. Our approach is human-led, tech-enabled - and it's creating real impact. So far, 90,000 tutors have delivered over 20 million lessons to learners in more than 175 countries. Every Preply lesson sparks change, fuels ambition, and drives progress that matters.

We're on a mission to transform lives through learning. In our Learning Teams, that means building the next generation of personalized, AI-enabled, media-rich experiences for learners and tutors around the world. If you care deeply about impact, quality, technology and culture – this is your chance to lead a part of it.

As a Staff Engineer in the Learning Teams, you will lead some of the most complex and strategic engineering initiatives at Preply. You will define and drive technical roadmaps and architecture, collaborate across product, engineering and business stakeholders, and influence our platform at scale. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad scope and strong impact – you will help shape how we build, ship and evolve our learning experiences globally.

What you'll be doing:

• Shape, drive, and co-own the Learning Teams' engineering strategy and own technical roadmap, partnering with Engineering and Product Leadership to align initiatives, priorities and dependencies.
• Lead end-to-end strategic initiatives and innovations, translating high-level product vision into technical execution, align scope and milestones and ship iteratively with measurable outcomes.
• Evolve architecture and core services into a scalable, reliable platform, defining target states, drive deprecations and migrations, and uphold technical excellence (availability, performance, cost).
• Raise engineering practices and developer experience, driving RFCs, post-mortems, quality frameworks (evaluations, instrumentation), identifying bottlenecks and driving initiatives that reduce toil and increase productivity across team.
• Operate as a multiplier: mentor and influence senior engineers, Tech Leads, EMs, and hiring panels; stay hands-on for the hardest, most impactful work.
• Make build-vs-buy and vendor/tooling calls with a clear view of total cost of ownership; lead evaluations and participate in negotiations.

What you'll bring:

• Strong foundation in software engineering and architecture; comfortable designing and evolving large-scale systems and deriving technical strategy from business objectives.
• Proficiency across the full stack, from frontend frameworks and mobile clients to backend systems, APIs, and data flows, with a focus on cohesive end-to-end experiences.
• Hands-on technical expertise, comfortable diving deep into code, building proofs-of-concept, and iterating quickly with teams to validate technical approaches.
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, able to articulate technical vision, trade-offs, and business value to both engineering, product and executive stakeholders. Able to influence without formal authority.
• Proven track record of taking ownership end-to-end, from defining scope, through delivery, launch, and operational stability.
• Analytical and creative problem-solving skills, able to explore multiple implementation paths, evaluate trade-offs, and make pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.
• Ability to operate across domains, new feature development, architecture evolution, system migrations, process improvement – all matters.
• Proven experience driving engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, influencing tech leads, leading hiring for key roles, establishing and evangelising RFCs, post-mortems, etc.
• Experience or strong interest in one or more of these domains: AI/ML, media/video platforms, large-scale system migrations, cost optimisation, data infrastructure, QA/test-automation at scale.

Why you'll love it at Preply:

• An 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.