Lead Backend Engineer - Stellic
San Mateo, CA
About the Job
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've partnered with 75 universities across 7 countries — including top institutions like Cornell, Columbia University, and Ohio State University — to empower 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.
Don't take our word for it, see it for yourself!
- "Stellic cut down 2 hours of brainpower before registration to just 30 minutes!" – Rising Senior
- "I noticed that when I was in meetings with my advisor after we got Stellic, we could spend more time talking about career paths, the future, and what made sense for me from a professional standpoint" - Rising Senior
- "One of the key things about Stellic is that I can have it open, my advisor can also have it open and see exactly what I'm looking at. And I don't have to hope and pray that they remember who I am." – Rising Junior
- "Just had the most AMAZING advising session...a student was changing majors and they built a new plan to show her parents within minutes. She was beaming (and so was I!)...this is incredible to use" - Advisor
- "Stellic has caused us to be more inspired about the work that we do. Having a platform that is agile, responsive, flexible and shows potential for moving forward - and a collaborative team approach - has been remarkable." - Administrator
What Sets Stellic Engineers Apart
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.
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
What you'll need:
- 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 and ability to mentor junior developers
- Impeccable communication skills for collaborating with product, design, and customer-facing teams
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.
What Tech We Use:
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, Shell
- Frameworks: Django, Angular, React, Remix,
- Databases: PostgreSQL
- Version control: Git (GitHub)
- Cloud: AWS
- Deployment: AWS CodeDeploy
Why Join
- Be part of a customer-centric team that is addressing the core issues in higher education via an expandable platform that is overwhelming loved by students and valued by administrators
- The opportunity to join at the ground level of a promising and developing organization, and build/lead a team critically responsible for its growth
- Work and learn from some of the most prominent thought leaders in higher education and SaaS
- Be part of a culture where ownership, new ideas, and creativity is celebrated
- Generous stock options in a Series A stage startup
- Flexible, outcome-based culture
- Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
- 401K and commuter benefits
- Annual international retreats in some of the most beautiful cities & towns
Compensation: $160,000 - $200,000 base salary, plus equity
Work location: Candidates must be willing to work in-office in San Mateo 3 days per week as part of our hybrid work culture.
Stellic is an Equal Opportunity Employer
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.
