About the job

Lingokids' mission is to help 100 million families around the world raise amazing children through playlearning™. To help us on this mission we’re looking for an exceptional Platform Manager. The role can be fully remote in the European timezone or based in our sunny Madrid office.

Our goal

We’re reinventing early childhood education through an online learning service for kids. With fresh content - games, books, videos, interactive episodes, etc - every week, we are helping millions of families and their children around the world learn in a fun and effective way.

Our dream is to have a positive impact on 100M families and we’re working hard to make it a reality. Our talented team of product designers, user researchers, product managers, data scientists, engineers, educational experts and content producers tweak and improve our product daily while incorporating feedback from our customers.

Are you ready to Playlearning with us?

As the Platform Manager, you will manage a team of platform and data engineers to build out an amazing internal platform that enables our product and data teams. Your work will be critical to ensure that our employees have the tools and infrastructure to supercharge their productivity and increase their leverage.

We have recently launched a freemium offering which has greatly expanded our monthly active user base. We need to ensure that we can cost-effectively meet this growing demand on our API and data platform. We are also making continuous investments in observability, performance monitoring and build automation to increase the productivity of our engineers.

We value simple solutions to complex problems. We are proud members of the Boring Technology Club and think strategically when choosing the best tool for the job. Our API is a Ruby on Rails majestic monolith hosted in AWS and our mobile apps are built using React Native.

Candidates for this role have several years of applied experience in managing and running platform teams to support growing businesses.

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

• Deeply understand the needs of our internal users and ensure that we build the tools, processes and infrastructure to support them.
• Provide line management for our platform and data engineering teams, ensuring the ongoing growth of the people, skills, tools and processes.
• Understanding the breadth and depth of our platform, data tools and product to ensure that you make the best decisions possible.
• Lead on defining our platform strategy in collaboration with the VP Engineering and wider team to ensure that we are expanding our capabilities to support the future needs of our business.
• Define a career progression framework for Platform and apply an effective performance management process to ensure ongoing development of all team members.
• Manage platform budgets to ensure that we are able to cost-effectively scale the business and
• Take responsibility for managing IT across Lingokids, either using an outsourced partner or taking the role in-house.

Essential Skills and Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience working in an engineering role within platform or data engineering organisations.
• 3+ years of experience successfully leading and managing medium sized (~5 people) multi-disciplinary platform or data teams.
• Experience working in and scaling a startup to serve a growing user base, ideally using AWS as your main infrastructure provider.
• Experience coaching and providing feedback on individual and team performance, to ensure delivery of high-quality work meeting the needs of our internal users and business.
• Strong interpersonal, communications and presentation skills. Able to articulate problems and solutions in a clear and concise manner. Able to clearly communicate platform goals and requirements to a wide range of partners and stakeholders, including senior executive management.
• Ability to juggle multiple projects, activities and deliverables while preserving platform goals and the needs of the team. Ability to balance near-term deliverables and long-term planning.
• A product-minded mindset. You have an interest in why decisions are made, how people use our platform and you love to be involved in making product decisions.
• Experience hiring a range of people and job roles to grow and develop the team’s capabilities.

English is a must. We are a multicultural team, and we are providing a service in English so, we don't care about certificates, but we expect you to be able to communicate fluently.

You should feel equally comfortable communicating in long-form writing. Given the circumstances, we have become a fully remote company. We believe that being articulate in both spoken and written long-form asynchronous communication is key to working efficiently together.