Senior Back-End Engineer Location: 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.

The Preply Engineering Team provides the tools to help unlock human potential through learning. We implement A/B tests to prove the value of our initiatives and improve our product based on data and students and tutors feedback. As part of our commitment to ensuring high-quality products, we prioritize monitoring and metrics analysis to identify areas for optimization and ensure our services are performing at their best.

We are tech-agnostic, meaning we are open to considering candidates with diverse technology backgrounds, such as Java/Spring, Node.js/Express.js, Ruby/Ruby on Rails, Scala/Play, PHP, or Golang. While Python is our primary programming language, prior experience with it is not mandatory. What truly matters is your enthusiasm for learning Python and your ability to adapt quickly to using it for product development.

At Preply, we release our product 50-60 times per day by leveraging top-notch CI/CD processes. As a fast-growing company we have diverse technical challenges that will allow you to develop your skills at scale. We’ve reached 90%+ adoption of AI coding tools across engineering, and we’re now moving towards more autonomous, AI-Augmented development at scale. At Preply, engineers have direct access to the best tools available, with the freedom to use them fully and experiment as they build.

What you’ll be doing

• You will work in a cross-functional team alongside the Product Manager, Product Designer, UX Writers, Data Analytics, Technical Leads, Engineers and other cross-functional team members to deliver engaging features through A/B tests and build top-notch products.
• Develop and own backend features using Python/Django, supporting the creation of new backend services as well as design, create, and/or troubleshoot integrations with third-party vendors.
• Think beyond the code and about our customers, understand their needs and define solutions with the team.
• Balance short-term speed of development with the long-term technical quality of our systems.
• As a Senior Engineer, you will leverage your experience to guide the team in making informed technical decisions, such as continuous improvement of best practices (test culture, code reviews, monitoring and scalability of our tools).

What you need to succeed

• Exposure to architectural patterns of a large, high-scale web application (e.g., well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms).
• AI Expertise: You're a forefront user of Agentic AI. You're able to bring hands-on experience and start influencing the team beyond code generation.
• Familiar and willing to support small JS/TS tasks when needed.
• Expertise in troubleshooting issues, identifying the root cause, mitigating it, and adding safeguards to prevent future issues.
• High level of self-organization, ownership, and responsibility.
• A great collaborator with excellent verbal and written communication skills. Minimum B2 English level.
• Willingness to be on-call for your squad (1 week every 5 weeks).

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.
• Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centres throughout Spain to promote and support well-being and physical health.
• The opportunity to shape the lives of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!).

Our Principles

• Care to change the world - We are passionate about our work and care deeply about its impact to be life changing.
• 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.
• Disciplined execution - What makes us disciplined is the excellence in our execution.
• 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.
• 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.
• One Preply - We prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and the success of our team over personal ambitions.

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.