ABOUT STELLIC

Remember the days when you were navigating your academic path — the feeling of being lost, unsure of which courses to take, or uncertain about your graduation timeline? At Stellic, we get it because our journey started just like yours. Born out of the challenges faced by international students at Carnegie Mellon, we’ve grown into a movement that’s reshaping the future of education by addressing one of higher education’s biggest challenges: the $200B dropout crisis.
Today, we are partnered with universities across 7 countries — including top institutions like Cornell, Columbia University, and Ohio State University — to empower 1M+ students to take control of their academic journey with clarity, confidence, and purpose. Our platform gives students the tools they need to plan ahead, stay on track, and succeed, from day one through graduation.
At Stellic, we believe in the power of personalized education, and our culture thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the passion to solve meaningful problems. Your ideas will have a real-world impact, as you work alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry to reimagine what education can be. Join us; together, we’ll help millions of students worldwide own their educational future.

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU:

• Deep experience with backend engineering using high-level programming languages and frameworks (Python/Django a plus)
• Deep experience with ORMs, RESTful APIs, background jobs, real-time streaming, etc; (DRF, Celery, Channels a plus)
• Experience with both single- and multi-tenant architectures
• Advanced skills in cloud deployment and hyperscalers (AWS a plus)
• Strong proficiency in designing and optimizing SQL databases and complex SQL queries (PostgreSQL a plus)
• Experience implementing secure AuthN/AuthZ systems using OAuth2, SAML, JWTs, RBAC/ABAC, etc.
• Experience implementing search engine capabilities (ElasticSearch a plus)
• Experience with asynchronous / event-based programming, message / event queues, etc.
• Strong background in API design, documentation, and versioning strategies
• Solid understanding of software testing, CI/CD practices, observability, etc. (AWS CodeDeploy, Sentry, Grafana, Prometheus a plus)
• Proficiency in building and managing data orchestration pipelines for ETL and other large-scale data processing problems using high-level languages like Python and frameworks like Dagster, Airflow, etc.

WHY THIS ROLE

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. Pieces of our architecture have reached their expiration date, yet we continue to have ambitious roadmaps that will allow us to continue to improve the lives of students all over the world. We need someone who can lead us into the future by driving upgrades to our backend architecture while at the same time up-leveling our current engineering team’s ability to delight our users with new product capabilities.

WHAT YOU’LL DO:

• Work closely with the founders and product managers to understand the Why behind each capability in the platform
• Help to 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
• Up-level our general engineering rigor and maturity by mentoring other engineers in best practices, design patterns, and code quality
• Ensure a high-degree of quality by designing robust testing strategies and implementing suites of reliable tests