Senior Platform Software Engineer - R&D Automation
Senior backend engineer on Preply's Platform team building AI agents that automate the software development lifecycle — designing agent harnesses in Python, reusable tools/integrations (APIs, MCPs), and orchestration/verification mechanisms for reliable, measurable agentic workflows.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- ~8 years of experience 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 AI capability platforms
- Strong understanding of modern agentic AI patterns: context management, tool use, orchestration, evaluation/verification
- Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, MCPs, internal tools, codebases, and other engineering systems
- Experience taking technical ideas from proof of concept to robust, scalable solutions
- Strong experimentation mindset: comfort with ambiguity, fast iteration, data-driven decisions
- Good understanding of distributed systems and backend architecture for reliable AI-powered systems
- Strong product thinking: understanding user workflows and connecting solutions to measurable outcomes
- Strong communication skills, minimum C1 English level
Full 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!
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! 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 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.