Staff Software Engineer - Platform | Paid relocation to Barcelona, Spain 🇪🇸
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.
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 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.
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.
- Not in Barcelona? We offer an attractive relocation package to join us in our Preply Barcelona Hub.
- Access to free mental health support platforms.
- Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centers throughout Spain to promote and support well-being and physical health.
