Senior Platform Database Engineer

Preply; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading Ed-Tech company in the UK is seeking a Database Platform Engineer to ensure the availability and performance of mission-critical databases. This role involves collaborating with engineering teams to enhance scalability and observing operational stability. The ideal candidate has extensive PostgreSQL experience and familiarity with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS. Join this dynamic environment where your contributions will matter significantly and shape the future of personalized learning.

Benefits

Generous monthly allowance for lessons

Learning & Development budget

Competitive financial package with equity

Qualifications

• Experience with operating PostgreSQL at high traffic in Master/Replica setups.
• Experience with distributed systems in the cloud.
• Proficient in DB monitoring and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Own the availability and performance of mission-critical databases.
• Improve the system's scalability and observability.
• Build tooling to improve our platform and accelerate software development.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

DB Capacity Planning

Performance optimisation

Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

DB monitoring

Communication (B2 English)

Tools

Django

RDS Aurora

NoSQL DBs

Python

Bash

Job description

This job is brought to you by Jobs/Redefined, the UK's leading over-50s age inclusive jobs board.

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!

The SRE team unites infrastructure, engineering and business to ensure great synergy that helps Preply succeed.

Our main focuses are:

• Top in the industry uptime record and latency.
• Invest in Platform's scalability.
• Develop core services & tooling powering our Platform.
• Running infrastructure in a cost effective way.

We work in small teams, thus you will be able to influence system design and contribute a lot in the company's growth. We promote self-direction to work on meaningful projects, while we also strive to create an environment that provides the support and mentorship needed to learn and grow.

We have diverse technical challenges that will allow you to develop your skills across the stack - sometimes we write about them in our Engineering Blog! Please, also visit our Tech Radar and our YouTube channel to learn more about the technologies we use at Preply!

What you'll be doing

The Database Platform Engineer at Preply is a database specialist who helps run and evolve our databases in an environment of continuous growth and change, where we need to meet operational stability, scalability and feature development. Our databases are mission-critical and directly impact our product uptime. You will bring deep expertise on databases, help us improve our operations, improve scalability and collaborate with engineering teams to guide them on evolving Preply together.

• Own the availability and performance of mission-critical databases and build automation to prevent problems recurrence.
• Improve the system's scalability, observability, and alerting.
• Build tooling to improve our platform and accelerate the overall software development.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.
• Collaborate with product teams to help them tackle technical issues and design new systems - bringing a unique perspective from the database side.
• Strengthen credibility with the quality of the team's technical execution.
• Follow the best FinOps practices.
• Participate in on-call rotation across the team.

What You Need To Succeed

• Experience with operating PostgreSQL at high traffic in Master/Replica setups, even multi-region.
• Experience with distributed systems in the cloud.
• Experience with: DB Capacity Planning & Scaling strategies, Backups and Disaster Recovery.
• Performance optimisation and DB tuning.
• Infrastructure proficiency to be self-sufficient in managing our database infrastructure in the cloud (preferably AWS).
• DB monitoring and troubleshooting.
• Familiarity with SRE principles.
• Willingness to participate on paid on-call rotations.
• Strong communication skills. Minimum B2 English level.

Nice to have

• Django ORMs or any other ORM
• RDS Aurora
• NoSQL DBs
• Scripting: Python and Bash

Why you'll love it at Preply

• Open, collaborative, dynamic and diverse culture.
• Generous monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com.
• Learning & Development budget, including time off for your self-development.
• Competitive financial package with equity, and leave allowance.
• Opportunity to shape the lives of learners and tutors from over 175 countries through language learning and teaching.

#LI-VS1

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

Preply.com 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.