Senior Engineering Manager – Data Platform

About the role

As Senior Engineering Manager for the Data Platform, you will own the strategy, execution, and health of the team that powers all analytics, ML and AI initiatives at Preply. You will lead a high‑performing group of data engineers, shaping the Lakehouse foundation and ensuring reliable, production‑grade data for the whole company.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and grow a data engineering team, fostering ownership, continuous improvement and technical excellence.
• Define the long‑term vision for the Lakehouse, ingestion layers, data contracts, enrichment and governance.
• Translate strategy into realistic plans, balancing platform investment with near‑term needs while maintaining speed, quality and cost efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership on batch and streaming ingestion, data modeling, quality and governance.
• Establish SLOs, observability and incident response to move from reactive firefighting to proactive reliability.
• Drive engineering best practices, code quality, operational excellence and technology evolution.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with Analytics, ML, Data Science, Product and Security stakeholders.
• Own hiring, team composition and evolving operating model as the platform scales.

Required profile

• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management.
• People‑centric leadership with a track record of building, coaching and retaining high‑performing teams.
• Strong technical judgment, systems thinking and ability to drive architectural discussions.
• Proven ability to partner with analytics, data science and product teams to deliver business impact.
• Clear communication, stakeholder leadership and results‑oriented mindset.

Required skills

• Modern data stack tools such as Spark, Flink, Kafka, Debezium, Airflow, dbt.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) and DevOps practices.
• Data governance, privacy and compliance concepts.
• Understanding of feature stores, ML data pipelines and GenAI use cases.

What we offer

• Open, collaborative and diverse culture.
• Generous monthly allowance for Preply lessons, learning & development budget and self‑development time.
• Competitive compensation package with equity, health insurance and leave allowance.
• Relocation support for candidates moving to Barcelona.
• Access to free mental‑health support platforms.