Senior Data Platform Lead, AI-Driven Pipelines

Preply; Barcelona; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Relocation package

Job summary

Preply is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Data Platform in Barcelona, hybrid role. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for analytics, ML, and product initiatives that rely on the Lakehouse and data pipelines.

You will coach engineers, define long-term data foundation vision, ensure reliability with SLOs, and partner with Analytics, ML Platform, Data Science, and Product teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management.
• People-centric approach and team-building skills.
• Strong technical judgment and systems thinking.
• A track record of hiring, coaching, and retaining high-performing teams, including senior engineers.
• Product & Business Partnership: comfortable working with Analytics, Data Science, ML, and Product partners to identify opportunities, prioritize investments, and drive measurable outcomes.
• Clear communication and stakeholder leadership with the ability to align teams and manage competing priorities.
• Results-oriented leadership with demonstrable business impact.
• Ethical leadership, fostering empathy, transparency, accountability, and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high-performing data engineering team, fostering a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.
• Coach and develop engineers, support them through regular feedback, mentorship, and career development, while creating an inclusive and collaborative team environment.
• Define and drive the long-term vision for Preply's data foundation — the Lakehouse, ingestion layers, data contracts, enrichment, and governance — ensuring alignment with company objectives and the needs of analytics, ML, and product teams.
• Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities, partner closely with Analytics, ML Platform, Data Science, and Product to ensure the team focuses on the datasets, pipelines, and tooling that deliver the greatest customer and business value.
• Own execution and delivery. Translate strategy into realistic plans, balancing foundational platform investment with near-term needs of consuming teams while surfacing trade-offs and maintaining speed, quality, cost efficiency, and predictability.
• Provide technical leadership, guide architecture across batch and streaming ingestion, data modeling, quality, and governance; help the team navigate trade-offs and remove technical obstacles.
• Own data reliability and trust. Establish SLOs, observability, and incident response for data pipelines, moving the platform from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability management.
• Champion engineering best practices. Drive continuous improvements in code quality, operational excellence, development processes, and technology evolution.
• Collaborate cross-functionally, work with stakeholders across the broader business to maximize impact and align on priorities, data ownership, standards, and outcomes.
• Own hiring quality, team composition, and operating model, evolving team boundaries as the platform and company needs change.

Skills

8+ years software or data engineering

5+ years in engineering management

People-centric leadership

Strong technical judgment and systems思

Hiring, coaching, retaining high-perf 

Product & Business Partnership

Clear communication and stakeholder 

Results-oriented

Ethical leadership

Tools

Spark

Flink

Kafka

Debezium

Airflow

dbt

Job description

Preply is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager for Data Platform in Barcelona, hybrid role. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for analytics, ML, and product initiatives that rely on the Lakehouse and data pipelines.

You will coach engineers, define long-term data foundation vision, ensure reliability with SLOs, and partner with Analytics, ML Platform, Data Science, and Product teams.