Tech Lead, Progress

About the role

You will own the technical direction and execution of the Degree Progress product at Stellic, translating complex algorithmic outputs into a reliable and trustworthy student experience. You will partner closely with our algorithms lead to operationalize SAT solver capabilities into coherent, explainable progress outcomes for students and universities. This role requires you to design systems where correctness is non-negotiable and results are both accurate and understandable in ambiguous academic contexts. You will define and drive the integration strategy between compute layers and product interfaces, ensuring seamless behavior across highly variable degree requirements. A core part of your responsibility will be to establish purpose-built testing frameworks that validate intricate academic rules at scale. You will balance deep technical execution with pragmatic prioritization, aligning engineering trade-offs with product goals. Ultimately, you will mentor the Progress team to deliver high-quality, maintainable solutions that instill confidence in our academic partners.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Drive the end-to-end technical ownership of the Degree Progress system, applying and validating SAT solver outputs to present reliable outcomes to students and advisors.
• Partner with the algorithms lead to ensure seamless translation of compute results into intuitive product behavior, handling the full spectrum of edge cases in degree requirements.
• Design, implement, and maintain a purpose-built testing framework specifically engineered to validate complex and variable academic rules and constraints.
• Champion correctness and reliability by establishing clear guarantees around performance, explainability, and behavior of progress calculations at scale.
• Lead technical prioritization by balancing engineering-driven initiatives with product-driven objectives for the Degree Progress roadmap.
• Mentor engineers on best practices, design patterns, and code quality to elevate the entire Progress team's craftsmanship.
• Define and own the architecture for integrating high-level programming logic with asynchronous and event-based systems to ensure robustness.
• Communicate effectively with product, design, and customer-facing teams to align technical constraints with stakeholder expectations and user needs.
• Ensure the system remains scalable and maintainable as Stellic serves a growing number of institutions and students across multiple countries.
• Contribute to a culture of curiosity and continuous learning, fostering an environment where debugging complex academic logic is both rigorous and transparent.
• Collaborate on the evolution of our tech stack, including Python, SQL, Django, and Angular, while remaining open to future tools that improve reliability and velocity.
• Identify and mitigate risks in production by establishing observability and testing practices tailored to academic rule complexity.
• Support the growth of the Progress team by setting clear expectations, providing feedback, and enabling junior engineers to succeed.
• Maintain a strong focus on user trust by ensuring that every degree progress outcome is explainable and verifiable.
• Work cross-functionally to align technical delivery with the strategic goals of improving student outcomes and institutional partnerships.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience operating at scale, with a track record of leading complex implementations as a technical lead.
• Strong intuition for designing systems that produce correct, explainable outcomes in ambiguous or edge-case-heavy domains such as academic planning.
• Experience building or working with purpose-built testing frameworks for validating complex business logic with high variability.
• Ability to reason about and debug systems where correctness verification is non-trivial and requires deep analytical thinking.
• Expertise building highly optimized, robust systems at scale that perform reliably under diverse academic workloads.
• Deep experience with backend engineering using high-level programming languages and frameworks, particularly Python and Django.
• Comfort with asynchronous / event-based architectures that support real-time progress calculations and updates.
• Clear and effective communication skills for collaborating with product, design, and customer-facing teams to translate academic requirements into technical solutions.
• Deep curiosity, customer empathy, and commitment to engineering as a craft, along with a desire to mentor junior developers and elevate team standards.

Practical notes

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