Senior Backend Engineer

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About Stellic 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 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.

The 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 drive alignment on the prioritisation of engineering‑driven priorities alongside 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 optimise 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.

Who You Are

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.

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.

Our Tech Stack

Languages : Python, SQL, Shell.

Frameworks : Django, Angular, React, Remix.

Databases : PostgreSQL.

Version control : Git (GitHub).

Cloud : AWS.

Deployment : AWS CodeDeploy.

Why Join Stellic

Shape the future of an impact‑driven company transforming higher education.

Work closely with mission‑driven leaders who are ambitious and committed to solving meaningful problems.

Own and scale the recruiting engine of a high‑growth startup.

Learn from the best : collaborate with leading voices in higher education and SaaS.

Competitive USD salary.

Generous stock options in a Series B stage startup.

Culture of excellence and ownership. We move fast, take responsibility, and aim high.

Flexible, outcome‑based environment with trust at the core.

Comprehensive health insurance. Stellic covers 100% of premiums for you and your dependents, plus 50% for parents.

Commute benefits to make daily life easier.

Annual international retreats in some of the world’s most beautiful cities and towns.

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.

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