Senior Platform Software Engineer - R&D Automation

Role details

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 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 R&D Automation team, you’ll focus on: - Agentic software development: building AI agents that automate and augment workflows across the entire software development lifecycle. - AI platforms and capabilities: creating reusable foundations, tools and integrations that allow agents to interact effectively with our codebases, engineering systems and internal knowledge. - Experimentation at speed: rapidly prototyping new approaches, measuring their effectiveness and scaling the ones that create meaningful value. - Safe and reliable automation: designing the right verification, context and human-in-the-loop mechanisms so agentic workflows can be adopted with confidence. 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 https://medium.com/preply-engineering! Please, also visit our Tech Radar https://tech-radar.preply.com/?_ga=2.72086362.855941533.1670530539-1369760810.1670530539 and our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@Preplyengineering-ie3bb to learn more about the technologies we use at Preply! WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING: The Senior Platform Software Engineer in the R&D Automation team, you’ll combine strong backend software engineering with hands-on AI expertise to build agentic systems that change how software is developed at Preply. - Design and build AI agents and the harness that power them using Python. - Build reusable agent capabilities, tools and integrations that connect AI systems with our engineering ecosystem and internal knowledge. - Develop agentic workflows across Engineering, Product, Design and Data, including coding, testing and code review, and across the broader software development lifecycle. - Experiment rapidly with new AI capabilities, taking ideas from proof of concept through validation and scalable adoption. - Design effective context, orchestration and verification mechanisms for reliable agentic workflows. - Measure how agents are used and the value they create, using data and feedback to continuously improve them. - Make thoughtful decisions about where AI can add value, where human judgment remains essential, and how the two should work together. - Collaborate closely with engineers, designers, product, and data teams across Preply to understand their workflows, drive adoption and identify new opportunities for automation. WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED: - Extensive experience (~8 years) designing and building complex backend software systems. - Strong software engineering skills with production experience using Python. - Hands-on experience building AI agents, agentic workflows or platforms that enable others to build and use AI-powered capabilities. - Strong understanding of modern agentic AI patterns, including context management, tool use, orchestration and evaluation/verification. - Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, MCPs, internal tools, codebases and other engineering systems. - Experience taking new technical ideas from experimentation or proof of concept into robust, scalable solutions. - A strong experimentation mindset: comfortable working with ambiguity, iterating quickly and using data and feedback to determine what works. - Good understanding of distributed systems and the backend architecture required to operate AI-powered systems reliably. - Strong product thinking, with the ability to understand user workflows and connect technical solutions to measurable outcomes. - 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 http://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!) 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 del