Senior Platform Software Engineer - SRE | Paid relocation to London or Barcelona

Preply; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health insurance

Relocation package

Learning budget

Self‑development time off

Job summary

Preply is seeking a Senior Platform Software Engineer in the SRE team to design, build, and operate highly available distributed systems at scale. You will blend software engineering with cloud infrastructure, storage, and observability to deliver core platform services for millions of users.

You’ll own reliability, build tooling, and drive scalable improvements while collaborating with product teams. Expect on‑call rotations and a strong focus on FinOps, performance, and end‑to‑end quality.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and maintaining high‑traffic distributed systems.
• Hands-on AI experience and ability to influence architecture using AI.
• Proficient Python development for platform services.
• Experience with major public cloud services (preferably AWS).
• Observability, metrics, logging, and alerting expertise.
• Willingness to participate in paid on‑call rotations.
• Business‑oriented with a data‑driven approach.
• Strong communication skills and English at C1 level.

Responsibilities

• Own availability and performance of mission‑critical services.
• Improve scalability, observability, and alerting of platforms.
• Build tooling to accelerate software development and reliability.
• Lead sustainable incident response with blameless postmortems.
• Collaborate with product teams on architecture and design.
• Strengthen credibility through high‑quality technical execution.
• Follow FinOps practices to optimize costs.
• Contribute to on‑call rotations across the team.

Skills

AI expertise

Distributed systems

Python

AWS

Observability

On-call

Communication

Business-minded

English (C1)

Tools

AWS

Python

Job description

At Preply, we’re all about creating life-changing learning experiences. We help people discover the magic of the perfect tutor, craft a personalised learning journey, and stay motivated to keep growing. Our approach is human-led, tech-enabled - and it’s creating real impact.

We’ve just reached unicorn status with a $150M Series D, accelerating our vision to transform education through human-led, AI-enhanced learning. Today, 100,000+ tutors teach 90+ languages to learners in 180 countries - and we’re only getting started. As a category-defining company, we’re shaping what the future of learning looks like at global scale.

Every Preply lesson sparks change, fuels ambition, and drives progress that matters. Joining Preply means helping define the future of education at global scale, and building something that truly matters for millions of people, every day.

Meet the team!

The Platform Tribe builds and operates the platform that Preply engineers develop and deploy on, and that millions of learners and tutors rely on every day. Our platform handles over 20bln requests per month, and we combine software engineering, distributed systems and cloud infrastructure to keep it reliable at scale while making it faster and easier for engineering teams to build on top of it.

As part of the SRE team, you’ll focus on:

• Reliability at scale: maintaining high availability while traffic continues to grow.
• Platform scalability: evolving the systems that support Preply as our product and engineering organisation grow.
• Developer productivity: building core services and tooling that help engineers ship safely and quickly - we run 100+ successful production deployments every business day.
• Efficient infrastructure: improving performance and reliability while making thoughtful FinOps trade-offs.

We work in small teams with significant ownership, so you’ll have a real say in architecture, technical decisions and how our platform evolves.

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 Senior Platform Software Engineer role in our SRE team combines software engineering practices with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems patterns, storage systems and observability to deliver on a wide range of projects - ranging from tooling to core Platform services which serve production traffic.

• Own the availability and performance of mission-critical services 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.
• 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:

• Extensive experience (~8 years) in designing, building, maintaining and troubleshooting high traffic distributed systems.
• AI Expertise: You're a forefront user of Agentic AI. You're able to bring hands‑on experience and start influencing the team beyond code generation; reserving judgment for architecture, business logic, and security, using AI as a thought partner and being able to set up quality gates and safety nets to enhance existing engineering workflows and propose AI‑native alternatives.
• Proficient software engineering skills (Python preferred).
• Experience with at least one major public cloud, its services and infrastructure (preferably AWS).
• Experience in implementing observability and alerting.
• Willingness to participate on paid on‑call rotations.
• Business‑orientation and data‑driven approach.
• Strong communication skills. Minimum C1 English level.

Why you’ll love it at Preply

• An open, collaborative, dynamic, and diverse culture;
• A generous monthly allowance for lessons on Preply.com, 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 shape the lives of learners and tutors through language learning and teaching in 175 countries (and counting!)
• 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.