About the role:
Preply provides online learning experiences that connect learners with tutors. Its Data Platform team builds a trusted, scalable data foundation for analytics, machine learning, and product features, supporting learning products used worldwide.
Responsibilities:
•Lead and grow a high-performing data engineering team, fostering ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence
•Coach and develop engineers through regular feedback, mentorship, and career development, while building an inclusive, collaborative team environment
•Define and drive the long-term vision for the data foundation, including the Lakehouse, ingestion layers, data contracts, enrichment, and governance
•Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities with Analytics, ML Platform, Data Science, and Product teams
•Own execution and delivery, turning strategy into realistic plans while balancing platform investment and consuming teams' needs
•Provide technical leadership across batch and streaming ingestion, data modeling, quality, and governance
•Establish SLOs, observability, and incident response for data pipelines
•Improve code quality, operational excellence, development processes, and technology
•Collaborate with business stakeholders to align priorities, data ownership, standards, and outcomes
•Own hiring quality, team composition, and the operating model, evolving team boundaries as needs change
Requirements:
•8+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management and experience leading data or platform engineering teams
•Strong technical judgment and systems thinking
•Experience hiring, coaching, and retaining high-performing teams, including senior engineers
•Ability to partner with Analytics, Data Science, ML, and Product teams to identify opportunities, prioritize investments, and drive measurable outcomes
•Clear communication and stakeholder leadership; ability to align teams, make decisions with incomplete information, and revisit assumptions
•Track record of driving team performance and measurable business-focused goals
•People-centric leadership, with empathy, transparency, accountability, and a commitment to psychological safety and helping engineers grow
Nice to have:
•Familiarity with Spark, Flink, Kafka, Debezium, Airflow, dbt, cloud platforms such as AWS/GCP, and modern DevOps practices
•Experience building data platforms for multiple teams in fast-growing companies
•Experience running a data platform as a product
•Experience with data governance, privacy, and compliance
•Familiarity with feature stores, ML data pipelines, GenAI/RAG data preparation, and Agentic AI
Benefits:
•Monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com
•Learning & Development budget and time off for self-development
•Competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance, and health insurance
•Relocation package to join the Barcelona Hub
•Free mental health support platforms
•Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centers throughout Spain
