Tech Lead, Explore

Stellic is growing! We're looking for a Tech Lead our ****newest product, Explore. Explore is a platform that helps prospective and transfer students plan their academic pathways before they ever set foot on campus. This is a 0→1 product area with meaningful architectural stakes, and we are looking for a technical leader who thrives in ambiguity and can build for the long term while moving fast. ABOUT US 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 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 EXPLORE TEAM The Explore team owns Stellic's newest product, focused on helping prospective and transfer students plan their academic pathways before enrolling at an institution. This product extends Stellic beyond enrolled students, introducing new workflows and user journeys centered around discovery, planning, and decision-making prior to joining a university. Explore is also the first system at Stellic to introduce multi-tenant concepts, which means the team is breaking new ground in how data is shared, isolated, and managed across institutions. As a newer product area, the team operates with a higher degree of ambiguity and iteration — balancing rapid product development with the need to establish a strong architectural foundation that can scale. As technical lead on Explore, you'll play a key role in shaping both the product and the underlying systems, helping define how Stellic expands into new user segments and new architectural paradigms. ABOUT YOU You've built product surfaces from 0 to 1 before, and you know how to make smart architectural calls when the path forward isn't fully defined yet. You're comfortable operating with ambiguity, and you bring strong judgment to decisions that will have long-term consequences. You understand that speed and quality aren't opposites — you know how to move fast while laying foundations that hold. AS OUR EXPLORE LEAD, YOU WILL OWN - The Explore product, end to end: Own the technical direction and evolution of the Explore product, from new capabilities for prospective and transfer students to the underlying systems that power them. - Multi-tenant architecture foundations: Establish the foundational patterns for Stellic's first multi-tenant system — defining how data is shared, isolated, and managed across institutions in a way that can scale. - Pragmatic architectural decisions in an evolving product space: Make clear, defensible calls in a fast-moving environment, balancing the speed of iteration with the need to build systems that hold up over time. - Clean, ergonomic APIs and reliable abstractions: Build and maintain the APIs and abstractions that handle complex business logic and data flows, keeping things simple for the engineers who build on top of them. - Engineering excellence: Drive engineering excellence by defining and mentoring on best practices, design patterns, and code quality across the team. TO BE SUCCESSFUL, YOU SHOULD HAVE - 5+ years of backend or full stack engineering experience operatin