Senior Backend Engineer

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 to drive alignment on the prioritization of engineering-driven priorities along side 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 optimize 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 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, 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 committe