Senior Data Engineer

Job description

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! At Preply, the Data ingestion and enrichment team provides a single, trusted, and scalable data foundation. The team ensures that all analytics, machine learning, and product features are built on unified, governed, and production-grade data assets in Preply’s Lake House, including the extraction, normalization, and generation of structured data from Preply’s unstructured assets, forming a durable data moat for AI-driven products. As a Senior Data Engineer in the Data Ingestion and Enrichment team, you will design and own the data layer that powers both Preply’s analytics, machine learning, and product. You will work closely with ML Platform, Applied/Data Scientists, Analytics Engineering, and Product squads to ensure that features, datasets, and pipelines are production-ready, observable, and reusable across the company. This role combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING: Build trusted ingestion & enrichment foundations (Data Lake and Data as a Product): Design, build, and own Preply’s data lake. Ensure every dataset has clear ownership, purpose, schemas, and quality expectations from first ingestion through downstream consumption by analytics, product, and ML teams. Treat trust, correctness, and predictability as first-class features of the platform. Own end-to-end ingestion pipelines (batch & streaming): Develop and operate scalable, reliable batch and streaming ingestion pipelines that support both real-time and analytical use cases. Design clear raw → standardized → consumption layers with explicit responsibilities, lineage, and retention strategies. Balance performance, cost, and reliability as the platform scales. Data quality, contracts & early validation: Define and implement data contracts between producers and consumers, covering schema, freshness, volume, and quality guarantees. Embed validation, anomaly detection, and quality checks early in the ingestion lifecycle to catch issues before they propagate. Standardize how quality metrics are measured, monitored, and surfaced across the platform. Enrichment, modeling & lifecycle management: Build enrichment logic that joins, standardizes, and contextualizes data across domains using shared definitions and reusable patterns. Support historical tracking, point-in-time correctness, and dataset versioning so downstream users can confidently analyze changes and impacts over time. Observability, reliability & operational excellence: Instrument ingestion pipelines with strong observability: freshness, latency, data quality, and cost metrics. Contribute to SLOs, alerting, and incident response playbooks so data failures are visible, diagnosable, and recoverable. Help move the platform from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability management. Governance & compliance by design: Apply consistent access control, classification, and privacy protections at ingestion time. Ensure sensitive data is properly masked, minimized, or anonymized by default, and that all data flows are auditable and traceable. Make governance invisible to users but deeply embedded in platform workflows. Enable self-service & standardization: Contribute to standardized ingestion templates, shared libraries, and platform tooling that enable teams to onboard new data sources independently within clear guardrails. Improve discoverability, documentation, and metadata so datasets are easy to find, understand, and trust without relying on tribal knowledge. Cross-team collaboration & ownership: Work closely with Product, Backend, Analytics, and ML partners to align on ingestion requirements, trade-offs, and priorities. Promote shared ownership of data quality and platform standards, and help foster a culture where teams move fast together under common data contracts and principles. WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED: - Exposure to and experience building architectural patterns of a large, high-scale application (e.g., well-designed APIs, high-volume data pipelines, efficient algorithms). - Solid experience working in platform or data engineering teams (or equivalent impact) with evidence of leading multi-stakeholder deliveries. - Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP or equivalent) and modern DevOps practices. - Hands-on experience designing and implementing real-time and batch data processing infrastructures using modern frameworks like Spark, Flink, Spark streaming, Kafka, Debezium, etc. - Expertise with orchestration tools such as Airflow, dbt, or similar. - Exceptional problem-solving skills paired with a proactive, innovative mindset focused on continuous improvement. - Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills (English level B2+) WHY YOU’LL LOVE IT AT PREPLY: - An open, collaborative, dynamic, and diverse culture; - A generous monthly allowance for lessons on http://preply.comPreply.com http://Preply.com, Learning & Development budget, and time off for your self-development. - Not in Barcelona? We offer an attractive relocation package to join us in our Preply Barcelona Hub - A competitive financial package with equity, leave allowance, and health insurance; - 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 unlock the potential 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 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 http://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.