Principal Software Engineer
•Skimmer· 2d
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal🇺🇸 USA
2d ago
Stellic·3 months ago
Stellic's Explore product is our newest and most open frontier. It's focused on the transfer experience — giving prospective and transfer students the guidance and pathways they need, and giving universities the tools to manage transfer rules, articulation, and admissions workflows. The roadmap is wide open. We're looking for a Product Lead who thrives in that kind of blank canvas, and who has the instincts to figure out what to build before anyone tells them.
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.
You've built products from scratch before — not contributed to someone else's vision, but started with a problem and figured out what to build. You're energized by ambiguity rather than paralyzed by it, and you know how to balance deep partner discovery with the conviction to make calls before all the data is in. You move fast, you learn constantly, and you hold yourself accountable for the outcome, not just the output.
The Explore product, end to end: Explore is Stellic's transfer experience product — covering transfer pathways, rules management, articulation, prospective student profiles, and admissions workflows. You're the ultimate owner of it, which right now means defining what it becomes.
The roadmap from the ground up: There's no inherited backlog to manage here. You'll do the discovery, identify the highest-leverage problems, and build a roadmap that earns trust with both university partners and internal leadership.
Partner-driven discovery: You'll be in the room — on calls, on-site when needed — learning how transfer processes actually work at different institutions and turning that into product decisions that scale.
Engineering partnership: You'll work daily with our engineering teams in the US and Pakistan, thinking through architecture, trade-offs, and sequencing together from the earliest stages of the product.
Pattern recognition across institutions: Transfer rules and requirements vary enormously across universities. You'll find the common threads and design solutions that work across many schools without building custom one-offs.
The long game: Even in a greenfield product, every decision you make shapes what's possible later. You'll need to hold the immediate build and the long-term platform vision at the same time.
6+ years of PM experience with demonstrable growth in scope and ownership over time
True 0→1 experience — you've defined a product problem from nothing, built conviction around a solution, and shipped something real
Comfort with ambiguity — you don't need a clear spec to get started; you know how to structure discovery, form hypotheses, and make directional calls with incomplete information
Strong partner instincts — you're at home in customer conversations, you ask better questions than most, and you translate what you hear into product decisions rather than feature lists
Technical depth without needing to write code — comfortable in architecture discussions and able to think through how decisions made today constrain or enable what's possible tomorrow
An ownership mindset — on an early-stage product, everything is your problem; you don't wait to be asked
Clear, engaging communication — with university partners, engineers, and leadership; you can make a fuzzy problem feel structured and a hard trade-off feel obvious
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.
Candidates must be willing to work in-office in San Mateo 3 days per week as part of our hybrid work culture.
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.