Technical Lead

Stellic•San Mateo, CA

7d•$210,000 - $260,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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 then 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 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. Stellic is at a significant crossroads. Having proved incredibly strong product-market fit, and having maintained enviable customer NPS ratings, it’s time to prepare for the next stages of our evolution. As we've grown, parts of our architecture have been pushed to their limits. We're investing in the next phase of scale while continuing to deliver ambitious product roadmaps. We're looking for technical leaders who can evolve our backend systems and up-level the team to delight our users with new product capabilities.

Requirements

5+ years of experience as a backend engineer operating at scale
Strong ownership mindset and the ability to autonomously lead and drive complex implementations
Deep curiosity, customer empathy, and commitment to engineering as a craft
Ability to plan, estimate, and manage the technical aspects of project execution and delivery
Excellent problem-solving skills
Desire to mentor junior developers
Clear and effective communication skills for collaborating with product, design, and customer-facing teams
Deep experience with backend engineering using high-level programming languages and frameworks -- ORMs, RESTful APIs, background jobs, real-time streaming, etc.
Strong proficiency in designing and optimizing SQL databases and complex SQL queries (PostgreSQL a plus)
Experience with asynchronous / event-based architectures
Strong background in API design, documentation, and versioning strategies
Solid understanding of software testing, CI/CD practices, observability, etc.

Responsibilities

Drive alignment on the prioritization of engineering-driven priorities along side product priorities
Design and lead the implementation of scalable backend architectures for mission-critical enterprise applications
Build and maintain clean, ergonomic APIs to handle complex business logic and data flows
Develop and optimize database schemas and queries to process terabytes of data efficiently
Identify and introduce abstractions to increase the performance and reliability of our systems
Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality.
Ensure quality by designing robust testing strategies and implementing suites of reliable tests