This role is hybrid/in-office preferred in San Mateo, California, with remote flexibility considered case by case.
Hybrid
Stellic is growing! We're looking for a Tech Lead our ****newest product, Explore. Explore is a platform that helps prospective and transfer students plan their academic pathways before they ever set foot on campus. This is a 0→1 product area with meaningful architectural stakes, and we are looking for a technical leader who thrives in ambiguity and can build for the long term while moving fast.
We're building a future where every student can move through their education with clarity, confidence, and purpose. Our platform transforms the student experience, giving them the tools they need to make the right decisions about their degree plans, track their journey, and build an education and career path that's truly their own.
Stellic is a fast-growing startup backed by leading social impact investors, partnering with top institutions like Cornell, Columbia, UVA, and Ohio State to support over 1 million students across 7 countries. As we scale to serve more universities worldwide, we remain deeply committed to this mission, driven by our values, and committed to building a high-performance team that's here to make a lasting difference on both students' lives and higher education.
Stellic engineers combine a rare blend of curiosity, creativity, and business acumen with the ability to deliver pragmatic solutions at high velocity with uncompromising quality. Our mission is to help students, and our engineers always have that in mind as they are building.
The Explore team owns Stellic's newest product, focused on helping prospective and transfer students plan their academic pathways before enrolling at an institution. This product extends Stellic beyond enrolled students, introducing new workflows and user journeys centered around discovery, planning, and decision-making prior to joining a university.
Explore is also the first system at Stellic to introduce multi-tenant concepts, which means the team is breaking new ground in how data is shared, isolated, and managed across institutions.
As a newer product area, the team operates with a higher degree of ambiguity and iteration — balancing rapid product development with the need to establish a strong architectural foundation that can scale.
As technical lead on Explore, you'll play a key role in shaping both the product and the underlying systems, helping define how Stellic expands into new user segments and new architectural paradigms.
You've built product surfaces from 0 to 1 before, and you know how to make smart architectural calls when the path forward isn't fully defined yet. You're comfortable operating with ambiguity, and you bring strong judgment to decisions that will have long-term consequences. You understand that speed and quality aren't opposites — you know how to move fast while laying foundations that hold.
The Explore product, end to end: Own the technical direction and evolution of the Explore product, from new capabilities for prospective and transfer students to the underlying systems that power them.
Multi-tenant architecture foundations: Establish the foundational patterns for Stellic's first multi-tenant system — defining how data is shared, isolated, and managed across institutions in a way that can scale.
Pragmatic architectural decisions in an evolving product space: Make clear, defensible calls in a fast-moving environment, balancing the speed of iteration with the need to build systems that hold up over time.
Clean, ergonomic APIs and reliable abstractions: Build and maintain the APIs and abstractions that handle complex business logic and data flows, keeping things simple for the engineers who build on top of them.
Engineering excellence: Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality across the team.
5+ years of backend or full stack engineering experience operating at scale, with a track record of leading complex implementations as a technical lead
Experience building and scaling 0→1 and 1→10 product surfaces — you know what it looks like to go from nothing to something real
Strong judgment in making architectural decisions in evolving and ambiguous domains
Experience introducing and shaping new system patterns (e.g., multi-tenant concepts, data sharing models)
Ability to balance speed, iteration, and long-term system design without sacrificing one for the other
Strong proficiency in SQL and database optimization (PostgreSQL a plus)
Clear and effective communication skills for collaborating with product, design, and customer-facing teams
Deep curiosity, customer empathy, and commitment to engineering as a craft
While we plan on introducing new technologies and capabilities, and potentially migrating away from current ones, here is the general shape of our current stack:
Languages: Python, SQL
Frameworks: Django, Angular, React, Remix
Databases: PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis
Version control: Git (GitHub)
Cloud: AWS
Deployment: AWS CodeDeploy
Observability & Analytics: Sentry, Grafana, Prometheus, PostHog, Metabase
Both single and multi-tenant architecture
Shape the future of higher education at a company leading the transformation of student success.
Work alongside an ambitious, mission-driven leadership team building something meaningful.
Own a piece of the journey with competitive salary, meaningful equity and a culture of excellence, speed and ownership.
Thrive in a flexible, outcome-driven culture built on trust and autonomy.
Exceptional benefits, including health insurance with Stellic covering 99% of your premium and 75% for dependents.
401(k), commuter benefits, and annual international retreats in incredible locations.
Our company values diversity and believes diverse teams make innovation possible. We encourage all qualified applicants from any race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or other characteristics to apply.
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