Director of Platform Engineering

**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**

We're looking for a Director of Platform Engineering to lead our Platform teams across SRE, Experimentation, Developer Experience and Design System - all key to powering our business. Reporting directly to the CTO and co-founder, this role will play a key part in scaling Preply's platform for the next stage of growth, ensuring our technology stack evolves in lockstep with product innovation and ambitious business goals.

**As a Director of Platform Engineering, you'll be responsible for**:

- Platform teams around clear goals, ownership boundaries, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering, data, and product.
- Architectural decisions, including the strategic decomposition of our monolith into modular, maintainable systems.
- Designing and delivering ML Ops capabilities from the ground up in collaboration with data science and infrastructure teams.
- Significantly optimizing Preply's cloud costs, while improving observability, tooling, and developer experience across the organization.
- Building a high-trust, high-performance team culture rooted in technical excellence, customer centricity, and continuous improvement.

**What you'll be doing**:

- Leading and growing a high-performing organization (initially 3-4 direct reports, 6-7 teams), with room to expand.
- Defining and driving the evolution of our infrastructure, architecture, cloud setup, and developer tooling.
- Leveling up key capabilities including ML Ops, database optimization, CI/CD practices, and AWS cost efficiency.
- Bringing deep technical insight to strategic architectural decisions, including our move to more modular systems.
- Contributing to our AI strategy by enabling teams to train, deploy, and scale models effectively.
- Collaborating closely with leadership to drive cross-functional initiatives and improving engineering velocity.
- Acting as a culture carrier and people leader: hiring exceptional talent, developing managers, and ensuring teams are engaged and aligned.
- Balancing technical vision, business impact, and organizational leadership to deliver results that matter.

**What you need to succeed**:

- Proven experience at Director level in Platform Engineering, or as CTO/VP Engineering in high-growth tech environments.
- Experience managing 30-50+ engineers across multiple platform-focused teams (SRE, Infra, DevOps, ML Ops).
- Deep understanding of modern infrastructure: AWS/cloud-native systems, CI/CD, observability, microservices, security, and cost optimization.
- Strong business acumen and a product mindset — you think in terms of value delivered, not just systems built.
- Exceptional people leadership skills — you know how to stabilize, align, and grow diverse, high-performing teams.
- Hands-on leadership experience in companies of high scale (ideally cloud, SaaS, edtech, or AI-driven).

**Why you'll love it at Preply**:

- An open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture;
- 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 shape the lives of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting).

**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 beco