Staff Platform Engineer — Lead Scalable Systems & Reliability in Oxford

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, we build scalable and reliable applications using Python/Django, with a strong focus on data, A/B testing, and feedback from students and tutors to guide our decisions. We prioritize product quality through robust monitoring, metrics analysis, and continuous optimization. Thanks to our advanced CI/CD processes, we release code 50–60 times per day.

Our Platform Tribe builds and operates the internal products that make it simple, safe, fast, and reliable for engineers to deliver value. The platform is designed around opinionated, well-supported paved paths, self-service by default, and guardrails over gates.

We are looking for a Staff Platform Software Engineer to be a high-leverage technical leader across the Platform Tribe. You will work across platform squads (Infrastructure, Runtime and Data, Developer Platform, Application Platform, Frontend Platform, Mobile Platform) to set technical direction, unblock complex problems, raise the quality bar through mentorship, and ship production changes hands-on. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on execution. Success is measured by durable improvements in platform capabilities and reliability, not by producing designs in isolation or serving as a centralized support function.

We have diverse technical challenges that will allow you to develop your skills across the stack.

What you’ll be doing:

• Provide technical leadership across platform squads: architecture decisions, engineering standards, paved paths, and reusable patterns that reduce cognitive load and increase consistency.
• Lead cross-squad and cross-engineering initiatives that improve the path from code to production: CI foundations, delivery workflow reliability, environments, and self-service entry points.
• Drive operability improvements: SLO thinking, dashboards, alerting standards, runbooks, failure recovery patterns, and incident readiness across platform-owned systems.
• Go deep on high-impact reliability and performance problems, including root cause analysis, remediation design, automation to prevent recurrence, and postmortem follow-through.
• Build and operate critical platform services and tooling that serve production traffic and internal users, with strong engineering quality and operational discipline.
• Act as a multiplier through mentorship: coaching senior engineers and tech leads, improving design quality, and raising execution standards across the tribe.
• Use data to guide priorities and measure outcomes (delivery health, reliability signals, adoption, and satisfaction), and help teams turn metrics into durable improvements.
• Participate in on-call and major incident response, leading by example and helping teams improve incident execution and prevention over time.

What You Need To Succeed:

• Strong track record as a senior technical leader (Staff or equivalent) delivering cross-team impact: setting standards, aligning stakeholders, de-risking complex technical decisions, and landing changes in production.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, maintaining, and troubleshooting high-traffic distributed systems in production.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python / Django, with the ability to write production-quality tooling and services.
• Deep experience with DevOps and cloud infrastructure (preferably AWS): networking basics, identity and access patterns, infrastructure automation, and operational best practices.
• Strong experience with CI/CD systems, build and test reliability, artifact management, and developer workflows.
• Strong foundations in reliability engineering: observability, alerting, incident response, capacity planning, and automation-driven prevention.
• Strong written communication and technical influence (RFCs, clear tradeoffs, and driving alignment).
• Willingness to participate in paid on-call rotations.

Why you’ll love it at Preply:

• An open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture.
• A generous monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com, Learning & Development budget and time off for your self-development.
• A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance and health insurance.
• Access to free mental health support platforms.
• The opportunity to shape the lives of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!).
• 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.