Senior Engineering Manager (GenAI & Agentic Platforms)

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!

AI Platform provides the shared foundations that help teams across Preply build, ship, and operate AI capabilities safely at scale. The area includes ML Platform, GenAI Platform, and Agentic Platform. You will lead GenAI and Agentic Platform: approximately 8-12 engineers across two teams, while partnering closely with ML Platform leadership.

GenAI Platform owns shared model access, routing, evaluation, observability, prompt and configuration lifecycle, retrieval, grounding, and guardrails. Agentic Platform builds on those foundations with durable execution, tools, state, context, memory, permissions, human controls, agent evaluation, and runtime safety.

The two teams share a Product Manager. Together, you will shape strategy, priorities, adoption, and outcomes; clarify what belongs in shared infrastructure versus product teams; and evolve the platform as models, frameworks, and company needs change.

Learn more through our Engineering Blog , Tech Radar , and YouTube channel.

What you’ll be doing:

GenAI and Agentic AI are central to Preply's AI strategy. As the Senior Engineering Manager for GenAI & Agentic Platforms, you'll own the engineering strategy, execution, and organizational health of two complementary teams that take AI workloads from experimentation to reliable production systems.

This is a multi-team leadership role for a manager with strong technical judgment. You won't be the primary implementer, but you'll go deep on architecture and production AI, coach senior engineers, shape platform abstractions and operational standards, and partner with Product, Applied Science, Data, Security, and Engineering teams.

In this role, your responsibilities include:

Set the long-term engineering vision for GenAI Platform and the Agentic Platform, ensuring they operate as a single, coherent platform.

Partner with the Product Manager across both teams to define outcomes, prioritize investments, and measure the impact of the platforms.

Lead and develop approximately 8-12 engineers across two teams through clear expectations, direct feedback, performance management, career growth, and coaching.

Own hiring quality, team composition, evolving team boundaries, and operating models as the platforms and company change.

Guide architecture across model access, evaluation, observability, retrieval, agent orchestration, tools, state, memory, permissions and control planes.

Translate strategy into realistic plans, balancing foundational investment with near-term product needs while surfacing trade-offs and maintaining speed, quality, and predictability.

Align senior stakeholders across Product, Applied Science, Data, Security and Engineering on platform standards, build-vs-buy decisions and shared priorities.

What you need to succeed:

8+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in engineering management and experience leading multiple teams or a multi-squad technical area.

A track record of hiring, coaching, and retaining high-performing teams.

Strong technical depth in platform engineering, backend or distributed systems, ML infrastructure or developer infrastructure.

Practical experience with production GenAI or Agentic systems and the ability to reason about model access, evaluation, observability, retrieval, agent orchestration, tool use, state, permissions, reliability, cost, and safety.

AI Expertise: You use Agentic AI beyond code generation to support architecture, planning, and decision-making, while retaining human judgment for architecture, people decisions, business logic, and security, and establishing quality gates and safety nets for team workflows.

Experience leading platform products, with a strong instinct for self-service, API design, developer experience, adoption and avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Clear communication and stakeholder leadership, with the ability to align teams with different incentives, make sound decisions with incomplete information and revisit assumptions as the ecosystem changes.

Requirements

• Experience managing teams that built AI or ML platforms used by multiple teams.
• Experience with agent frameworks or durable workflow technologies such as LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, or Temporal.
• Hands-on familiarity with GenAI evaluation and observability, prompt or model lifecycle, retrieval systems, multi-provider routing or open-model serving.
• Experience making build-vs-buy decisions without locking the organization into one provider or framework.
• Experience measuring platform success through adoption, customer outcomes, and engineering leverage rather than infrastructure delivery alone.
• 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;
• Access to free mental health support platforms;
• Access to Gympass-partnered wellness and gym centers throughout London 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.