Ukrainian EdTech startup Preply recently became a unicorn after attracting new investment. The company now plans to expand its engineering staff and focus more on development teams and product. Currently, DOU has over 10 vacancies open in its Kyiv office.
Ukrainian EdTech startup Preply recently became a unicorn after attracting new investment. The company now plans to expand its engineering staff and focus more on development teams and product. Currently, DOU has over 10 vacancies open in its Kyiv office.
"We plan to hire about a hundred engineers. And we will be very happy if a significant part of these people will be in Ukraine. Our ability to hire here is limited only to the number of specialists who are suitable for us in terms of culture, hard skills, and level of English," said Dmytro Voloshyn, co-founder and CTO of Preply, in an interview with DOU.
The company currently has about 20 product teams and about 200 engineers in three main engineering hubs in Kyiv, London, and Barcelona. But over time, they plan to grow to about 30 teams.
Backend engineers are the most critical roles for the company right now.
"We work with Django and Python on the backend, and we have one of the largest Django installations among large marketplaces. This creates specific challenges for the framework and language, so we need strong backend engineers who have already worked with such a scale," Voloshyn added.
In addition, Voloshyn noted that the company has a strong platform team: SRE engineers, database engineers, ML Ops and security engineers. All of these positions are being hired in Kyiv.
So over the next six months, Preply will focus on these teams: back-end platform, front-end platform, mobile platform. These people will be responsible for ensuring that the product is user-friendly and scalable from the inside, while other teams can work faster.
In addition, the demand for AI engineers is growing. In particular, the company is hiring ML engineers and prompt engineers. In job descriptions, such specialists are sometimes called computational linguists, but these people must be able to work efficiently with LLM and evaluate the results of models through the so-called EVAL sets.
In January, Preply opened 12 vacancies on jobs.dou.ua:
It is noticeable that most of them are for seniors. Voloshyn explains this by the scale of the project.
"When you build a product on such a scale, there are many technological and architectural challenges. From a business point of view, it is easier for us to work with engineers who are used to complex code bases and large products. Therefore, we want to hire more senior specialists to move faster. But we also hire juniors, it's just that such vacancies — about 5% of them — are closed quickly," explained the CTO of Preply.
