Senior Manager - Machine Learning

About Preply

At Preply, we are unlocking human potential through learning. We believe learning with a great tutor is life‑changing. That’s why we match online tutors from across the globe with learners and empower them to create live language classes with AI‑powered tools and learning materials. This is how we deliver progress, create engagement and keep our global community of learners motivated. So far, over 32,000 tutors have given more than 15 million lessons to learners from over 175 countries.

Meet the team! The Data Chapter drives Preply to make the best decisions for our business, learners and tutors, by building a data‑driven organization and the best data products. We leverage a mature data‑ecosystem, built with state‑of‑the‑art technologies. As Data Managers, we are deeply involved in people, business, products, marketing, and technologies. In partnership with product managers, we look for business opportunities and take them to bring the company to the next level. Two Data Scientists will report to this position. Due to the small team size and specific focus, this role will be strongly hands‑on, at first. The right candidate should be able to set a clear strategy for the algorithm and actively work on its implementation. Over time, this team is expected to extend their scope beyond the ranking algorithm into additional AI/ML applications, establishing a framework for the entire organization. They are expected to chart the path to personalisation and real‑time capabilities, enabling AI/ML at scale, by implementing an ML Ops strategy in close partnership with the Data Strategy and Platform teams.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Hire, scale and nurture a Data Science team.
• Define a long‑term vision and set them up for success.
• Keep them motivated by achieving an optimal balance between achievement and challenge.
• Setting a clear strategic direction for the ranking algorithm and AI/ML at scale.
• Building end‑to‑end ML solutions that drive tangible business impact.
• Designing and analyzing AB experiments to improve model performance and user experience.
• Conducting in‑depth data analysis to extract meaningful insights and drive data‑informed improvements on the ranking model.
• Writing production code and developing pipelines when it is needed.
• Collaborating closely with software engineers to understand system constraints and deliver effective solutions.
• Working closely with product teams to identify user needs and leverage ML solutions to enhance the learning experience for both learners and tutors.
• Work closely with our Data Strategy team to define standard methodology, tools and best practices for your team.

What You Need To Succeed

• Minimum 3-4 years of previous experience as a Product Data Scientist focused on machine learning products, leading an ML/Data Science team or a similar role.
• Having a solid understanding of machine learning techniques, including linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, gradient boosting.
• Demonstrating proficiency in Python and SQL, with prior experience in ML frameworks such as sklearn, pandas, numpy, xgboost, lightgbm, etc.
• Experience and/or interest in extracting insights, identifying patterns, and uncovering trends from large datasets.
• Exhibiting strong curiosity, problem‑solving skills, and the ability to identify and address underlying problems.
• Bachelor's degree in a relevant technical field.
• Possessing strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

Nice To Have

• Experience in Marketplaces and/or digital businesses (B2B, B2C, B2B2C).
• Experience in the areas of ranking or recommender systems.
• Masters degree or PhD in a quantitative field.
• Ability to apply statistical techniques to derive meaningful insights and make data‑driven decisions.
• Experience with Databricks environment and Spark.