Principal Software Engineer
•Skimmer· 2d
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal🇺🇸 USA
2d ago
Stellic·about 1 month ago
Stellic is growing! We're looking for a ****Tech Lead for the Plan team that owns the systems that power how students plan their academic journeys — from degree planning and pathways to scheduling and registration. This is a high-stakes, high-visibility area of our product, and we need a technical leader who can keep these systems reliable under peak load while shaping the next generation of planning experiences.
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 Plan team owns the systems that enable students to plan their academic journey — including degree planning and pathways, scheduling, and registration. This area is actively evolving from curriculum-centric planning toward more flexible, pathway- and career-oriented experiences, requiring the team to rethink how students explore options and make decisions about their academic paths.
A critical part of this system is registration, which allows students to enroll in courses at their university. Registration periods are high-stakes moments where reliability, performance, and seamless execution are non-negotiable.
The team is currently focused on improving the reliability, scalability, and performance of these systems, while continuing to evolve the product to support more dynamic and personalized planning experiences.
As technical lead on Plan, you'll play a key role in ensuring these systems operate predictably and efficiently under peak load, while shaping the next generation of planning and pathway experiences.
You've built and operated reliable systems in high-stakes environments before, and you know what it takes to keep things running smoothly when the pressure is on. You have strong intuition for performance and concurrency, and you're equally comfortable thinking about long-term product evolution and near-term system stability. You care about getting the details right and can balance competing priorities without losing sight of either.
Planning, pathways, scheduling, and registration — end to end: Own the technical direction and evolution of the systems that power these core student-facing experiences across their academic journey.
Reliability of registration systems: Ensure registration systems perform predictably and efficiently during high-stakes registration periods, when students and institutions are counting on every interaction to work.
Systems built for peak load: Design systems that handle concurrency and peak demand gracefully, with clear strategies for testing and validating behavior at scale.
The shift to career-focused planning: Enable our product to evolve from degree-centric planning toward more flexible, pathway- and career-oriented experiences — without sacrificing the stability of the systems underneath.
Testing strategies at scale: Ensure quality by designing robust, scalable testing strategies that validate system behavior under the conditions that matter most — including peak load and high-concurrency registration scenarios.
Engineering excellence: Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality across the team.
5+ years of backend engineering experience operating at scale, with a track record of leading complex implementations as a technical lead
Experience owning and operating reliable systems in high-stakes workflows where performance and availability are critical
Strong intuition for designing systems that behave predictably under peak load and concurrency
Ability to balance product evolution with system stability and performance — you can push things forward without breaking what's already working
Strong proficiency in SQL and database optimization (PostgreSQL a plus)
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
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.