Senior Data 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 personalized learning journey, and stay motivated to keep growing. Our approach is human-led, tech-enabled - and it's creating real impact. So far, 90,000 tutors have delivered over 20 million lessons to learners in more than 175 countries. Every Preply lesson sparks change, fuels ambition, and drives progress that matters.

Meet the team

At Preply, data is at the heart of every decision we make, from optimizing tutor-learner matching to scaling personalized learning experiences across the globe. With hundreds of A/B experiments running concurrently and vast volumes of behavioral, transactional, and interactional data generated daily, our platform presents a rich and complex data ecosystem. 

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will architect and lead Preply's data platform. You will define chapter standards, mentor engineers, and deliver cross-team initiatives that enable experimentation at scale, ML-driven personalization, and near–real-time analytics, turning data into measurable business outcomes. This role blends deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership across squads. 

We're looking for someone who is excited to build, own, and elevate a world-class data platform, and who sees data engineering not just as a technical challenge, but as a strategic force multiplier for the entire company. 

Why You'll Love This Role

• Shape the future of Data at Preply: Play a critical role in defining and scaling our Data Engineering practices, establishing foundational architectures that drive lasting impact.

• End-to-end ownership: Own and optimize the complete data platform, from ingestion and orchestration to storage, transformation and retention, ensuring reliability, scalability, and efficiency.

• Cutting-edge technology: Engage with a sophisticated data stack using Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Databricks, Kafka, Kubernetes, Cursor, and explore emerging technologies to address evolving business needs. Check out our Tech Radar for more info

• High-impact collaboration: Collaborate deeply different job functions  to maximize data accessibility, enhancing teams' autonomy.

• Growth and learning: Deepen your expertise in big data architectures, cloud-native computing, Kubernetes, and real-time data processing - all within a fast-paced, innovation-driven startup environment.

What you'll be doing

• Own platform architecture & roadmaps. Design and evolve ingestion → orchestration → storage → serving with clear SLOs for cost, performance, and reliability. Lead RFCs and land decisions that scale across squads.

• Set chapter standards. Establish patterns for Airflow/dbt, Spark/Databricks, Snowflake, Kafka/streaming, testing and governance, and drive their adoption through templates policies

• Lead complex builds. Deliver large-scale batch, CDC, and streaming pipelines with strong observability, backfill strategies, data contracts, and SLAs/SLOs.

• Data quality & governance. Institutionalize schema/expectations, lineage, and incident runbooks to reduce data downtime and protect downstream analytics/ML.

• ML enablement. Partner with Applied Science to make features and datasets production-ready, unblock training/serving, and standardize MLOps practices used by multiple teams.

• Mentor & raise the bar. Coach engineers, lead design reviews, and be a subject-matter expert who elevates the chapter's technical quality and execution.

• Stakeholder leadership. Align PM/Analytics/DS, communicate trade-offs to senior leaders, and drive cross-team initiatives to closure.

What you need to succeed

• 6+ years of data engineering (or equivalent impact) with evidence of leading multi-stakeholder deliveries.

• Expert SQL and Python plus production Spark; hands-on Databricks performance tuning

• Proven delivery with Airflow and dbt (incrementals, testing, freshness SLAs).

• Extensive experience with high-volume data ingestion techniques (e.g., CDC) and familiarity with third-party ingestion tools.

• Snowflake at scale: micro-partitioning/clustering strategy, cost/perf tuning, tasks/streams/dynamic tables

• Proven expertise building mature Data Platforms with ETL orchestration frameworks and modern data transformation practices following best-practices data modelling.

• Solid understanding and experience working within cloud-based data ecosystems.

• Exceptional problem-solving skills paired with a proactive, innovative mindset focused on continuous improvement.

• Ability to collaborate effectively across teams with security, engineering, and data.

• Fluent written and verbal English communication skills (C1 level or above).

Nice to have

• Previous success in scaling data infrastructures within fast-growing startups

• Proven experience designing and implementing real-time data infrastructures

• Streaming/CDC experience (Kafka/Debezium/Snowpipe Streaming) with idempotent/"exactly-once" patterns

• Experience developing the foundational data architecture for a ML Platform, including experience with feature stores

• Expertise with AWS or Google Cloud data ecosystems.

• Terraform/Kubernetes for data tooling

• Monte Carlo/Great Expectations or equivalent for data reliability

Why you'll love it at Preply

• An open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture;

• A generous monthly allowance for lessons on , 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; 

• The opportunity to unlock the potential of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting).

#LI-VL1

Our Principles

• 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

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.

---