Platform Lead

📋 Job Overview

Stellic is growing! We're looking for a Platform Lead to own the technical direction of the systems at the center of our architecture. We're investing heavily in AI capabilities, search infrastructure, and shared platform primitives — and we need a technical leader who can shape both what we build and how teams across engineering build on top of it.

🏢 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 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.

🎯 The Role

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 Platform team is responsible for building both foundational infrastructure and key product surfaces that power Stellic's core experiences. The team owns critical systems such as search, which underpins much of the user experience, as well as a growing set of AI-driven capabilities, including AI Analytics and the AI platform. These systems span both end-user-facing features and internal building blocks used across the product.

In addition to owning features end-to-end, the team develops shared primitives such as workflow infrastructure and AI systems used broadly across engineering. The team is currently focused on improving the reliability and scalability of these systems, while continuing to build new capabilities that expand what's possible across the product.

As a technical lead on Platform, your work will have broad impact across teams and the overall product, shaping both the systems we build and how other teams build on top of them.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and evolution of Stellic's search infrastructure and AI platform — from end-user features like search and AI Analytics to the internal systems teams use to build AI-powered capabilities across the product.
• Design and evolve shared building blocks — including workflow infrastructure and AI systems — used broadly across engineering. Your decisions shape how other teams build.
• Own consistency and quality across shared systems that have broad usage and impact across engineering. Establish clear patterns and abstractions that enable other teams to build on platform capabilities effectively.
• Partner on prioritization of engineering-driven and product priorities, acting as a true peer to product leadership.
• Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality across the team.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience operating at scale, with a track record of leading complex implementations as a technical lead
• Expertise building scalable AI platforms that enable product teams to develop AI-powered features
• Experience designing and maintaining ElasticSearch-powered search platforms at scale
• Expertise building observable, testable systems at scale — you think about reliability and debuggability from the start
• Strong ownership mindset and the ability to autonomously lead and drive complex implementations end-to-end
• Experience with asynchronous / event-based architectures and strong API design skills
• 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 — and a desire to mentor junior developers

⭐ Desirable Experience

• Experience with AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis, and observability tools like Sentry, Grafana, Prometheus, PostHog, and Metabase.

🎁 Benefits

Estimated base salary $235K – $275K • Offers Equity

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 work, and the opportunity to make a lasting impact.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

No visa or eligibility information provided.