Staff Back-end Engineer

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! This is a high-impact individual contributor role with broad scope. You will operate at the intersection of product, engineering, and business, driving strategy, architecture, and execution for some of the most critical areas of Preply. At Preply, being a Staff Engineer is about multiplying impact beyond a single team. You don’t just execute, you help define what problems matter, align teams around them, and drive solutions across the organization. You’ll partner closely with engineering and product leadership, shape technical direction, and raise the bar for how we build and scale. You’ll be joining one of our Product Tribes — Learning or Monetization: - In Learning, you’ll help build the next generation of AI-powered, personalized learning experiences for millions of users. - In Monetization, you’ll work on high-impact systems like payments, subscriptions, and bookings — directly influencing revenue, conversion, and the future of how tutors earn on the platform. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING - Shape technical strategy & drive execution. Partner with Engineering and Product leadership to define and co-own the tribe’s engineering strategy and technical roadmap. Lead end-to-end strategic initiatives, from ideation to delivery, translating product vision into clear technical execution, aligning scope, milestones, and delivering measurable outcomes iteratively. - Lead architecture & platform evolution. Act as a key architect for the future state of our systems. Evolve core services into a scalable, reliable platform by defining target architectures, driving migrations and deprecations, and ensuring technical excellence across performance, availability, and cost efficiency, always balancing long-term vision with pragmatism. - Raise engineering excellence & developer experience. Continuously improve how we build. Identify bottlenecks, reduce friction, and drive initiatives that increase team productivity. Champion high engineering standards through RFCs, post-mortems, and quality frameworks (instrumentation, evaluations), ensuring we build the right things in the right way. - Operate as a multiplier. Extend your impact beyond your own work. Mentor and influence Senior Engineers, Tech Leads, and Engineering Managers, contribute to hiring, and elevate the overall technical bar. Stay hands-on for the most complex and high-impact challenges, leading by example where it matters most. - Drive technical decision-making. Own critical technical and strategic decisions, including build-vs-buy trade-offs. Lead tooling and vendor evaluations with a clear understanding of total cost of ownership, ensuring decisions align with both technical needs and business goals. WHAT YOU’LL BRING - Strong Python expertise. Python is a core part of our stack, so we’re looking for someone who is very comfortable designing, building, and reviewing production systems in Python. - Strong engineering foundations & system thinking. You have a solid background in software engineering and architecture, with experience designing and evolving large-scale systems. You’re able to deriv