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 Progress Lead to own the technical direction of our Degree Progress product. We're evolving from a search-based system to a SAT solver–driven architecture, and we need a technical leader who can operationalize that algorithmic power into a product that students and universities can genuinely trust.
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 Progress team owns Stellic's Degree Progress product, which enables students and administrators to track progress toward degree requirements and academic goals. The team is split across two closely related areas:
Compute: focuses on the underlying algorithm and correctness of results
Product: focuses on applying, validating, and presenting those results in a reliable and intuitive way
This role leads the entire team, working in close partnership with our algorithms lead. The team's primary focus right now is improving the scalability and reliability of the system, with a heavy emphasis on building purpose-built testing frameworks to validate complex and highly variable degree requirements.
You've built systems where correctness isn't negotiable — where the output needs to be right, explainable, and testable across a massive range of edge cases. You think deeply about validation, debugging, and what it means to deliver reliable outcomes in complex domains. You're as comfortable partnering with an algorithms lead as you are setting technical direction for your own team.
Degree Progress systems, end to end: Own the systems that orchestrate and operationalize results from the SAT solver into user-facing experiences — applying, validating, and presenting degree progress outcomes in a way that students and advisors can trust.
Algorithm-to-product integration: Partner closely with our algorithms lead to ensure seamless integration between compute outputs and product behavior across the full range of edge cases that complex degree requirements introduce.
Purpose-built testing frameworks: Design and implement testing infrastructure specifically built to validate complex and highly variable degree requirements — one of the team's biggest current investments.
Correctness and reliability: Ensure the system delivers reliable, explainable outcomes across edge cases, with clear guarantees around performance and behavior.
Technical prioritization: Drive alignment on engineering-driven priorities alongside product priorities.
Engineering excellence: Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality.
5+ years of backend engineering experience operating at scale, with a track record of leading complex implementations as a technical lead
Strong intuition for designing systems that produce correct, explainable outcomes in ambiguous or edge-case-heavy domains
Experience building or working with purpose-built testing frameworks for validating complex business logic
Ability to reason about and debug systems where correctness verification is non-trivial
Expertise building highly optimized, robust systems at scale
Deep experience with backend engineering using high-level programming languages and frameworks
Comfort with asynchronous / event-based architectures
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 — and a desire to mentor junior developers
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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