Senior Talent Acquisition Partner - Engineering

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! Talent Acquisition at Preply is a high-performing, ambitious team that’s deeply embedded in the business. We are obsessed with raising the bar - constantly iterating, innovating, and learning together to be best-in-class. We’re technology driven, data-informed, and we think critically about our business and map, engage and prioritize according to customer and business outcomes. But we also care deeply about collaboration, thinking team-first, and supporting each other along the way. Building an iconic company should be fun 🙂. We’re now looking for a Senior Talent Acquisition Partner - Engineering, to join our Tech & Product TA team. You’ll play a critical role in hiring exceptional talent across our tech and engineering functions. You’ll bring deep recruiting expertise, a strategic mindset, and a love for building effective, scalable processes. This role is about more than filling roles; it’s about helping shape the future of Preply’s tech and product organization. ABOUT THIS ROLE As Preply continues to scale, Engineering remains at the core of our product, growth, and future. We're looking for a Senior Talent Acquisition Partner to own hiring for some of our most complex and highest-impact Engineering searches - think niche specialisms like SRE, Security, and senior Engineering Manager roles - while raising the bar for how the wider team sources, assesses, and closes technical talent. This is an individual contributor role for someone who is already excellent at the craft: someone who can run a search end to end, push back credibly on senior engineering stakeholders, and bring data and process thinking to hiring rather than just executing against a brief. You'll work closely with Engineering Directors and Hiring Managers, and with the TA Manager Engineering to help shape how the function calibrates, sources, and improves over time. It's a great fit for someone who has outgrown a purely execution-focused recruiting role and wants to take on the toughest positions in the pipeline, while also having a wider footprint - coaching peers, contributing to calibration, and helping fix what isn't working. WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING: - Own complex, hard-to-fill Engineering searches end to end: manage full-cycle recruitment for our most senior and niche roles, where the market is thin and the bar is high. - Partner with senior Engineering stakeholders: build credible relationships with Engineering Directors, VPs, and Hiring Managers - understanding their needs, challenging assumptions where needed, and advising on realistic hiring strategies. - Source actively and creatively: build and execute targeted sourcing strategies for passive, senior technical talent, using tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, GitHub, and Stack Overflow, and adapting your approach as roles evolve. - Bring data into every decision: track your own funnel health, conversion, and time-in-stage, and use that data to diagnose what's working and flag what isn't - both in your own roles and, where relevant, across the wider Engineering pipeline. - Contribute to calibration and hiring bar consistency: help refine scorecards, participate in and support calibration sessions, and act as a reference point for what "good" looks like across a large interviewer panel. - Raise the bar beyond your own roles: support process improvements, interview training, or employer branding initiatives that benefit the whole Engineering hiring function, not just your own pipeline. - Coach and share knowledge: act as an informal sounding board for less experienced TA Partners working through difficult roles, offer declines, or pipeline blockers. - Deliver a strong candidate experience: represent Preply well to a highly selective, in-demand talent pool, especially in AI/ML and other specialist domains. WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED: - Strong technical recruiting craft: several years of experience recruiting for Engineering roles at scale, with a track record on genuinely difficult, niche, or senior searches - not just high-volume mid-level hiring. - Real stakeholder gravitas: experience partnering with senior engineering leaders, and evidence you've pushed back on requirements or bar when needed, not just executed what was asked. - A track record of wider impact: you've contributed to something beyond your own roles - calibration, interview training, process improvement, mentoring - that shows chapter-wide or company-wide thinking. - Active sourcing ability: you don't wait for inbound; you know how to build and run a sourcing strategy for senior, specialised technical talent. - Data fluency: comfortable tracking and interpreting your own recruiting metrics, and using them to explain decisions and diagnose problems. - High bar, high standards: you've worked somewhere with a genuinely selective hiring process and understand what strong technical hiring looks like - this isn't your first structured, high-bar environment. - 7+ years of recruiting experience, with meaningful time spent as a senior technical recruiter or equivalent. - A team-first, low-ego approach: generous with knowledge, motivated by raising the bar for the whole function, not just closing your own roles. 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.