Lead Quality Engineer

About Stellic

Remember the days when you were navigating your academic path — the feeling of being lost, unsure of which courses to take, or uncertain about your graduation timeline? At Stellic, we get it because our journey started just like yours. Born out of the challenges faced by international students at Carnegie Mellon, we’ve grown into a movement that’s reshaping the future of education by addressing one of higher education’s biggest challenges: the $200B dropout crisis.

Today, we are partnered with universities across 7 countries — including top institutions like Cornell, Columbia University, and Ohio State University — to empower 1M+ students to take control of their academic journey with clarity, confidence, and purpose. Our platform gives students the tools they need to plan ahead, stay on track, and succeed, from day one through graduation.

At Stellic, we believe in the power of personalized education, and our culture thrives on collaboration, innovation, and the passion to solve meaningful problems. Your ideas will have a real-world impact, as you work alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry to reimagine what education can be. Join us; together, we’ll help millions of students worldwide own their educational future.

Don’t take our word for it, see it for yourself!

• "Stellic cut down 2 hours of brainpower before registration to just 30 minutes!" – Rising Senior
• “I noticed that when I was in meetings with my advisor after we got Stellic, we could spend more time talking about career paths, the future, and what made sense for me from a professional standpoint" - Rising Senior
• “One of the key things about Stellic is that I can have it open, my advisor can also have it open and see exactly what I’m looking at. And I don’t have to hope and pray that they remember who I am." – Rising Junior
• "Just had the most AMAZING advising session...a student was changing majors and they built a new plan to show her parents within minutes. She was beaming (and so was I!)...this is incredible to use" - Advisor
• “Stellic has caused us to be more inspired about the work that we do. Having a platform that is agile, responsive, flexible and shows potential for moving forward - and a collaborative team approach - has been remarkable." - Administrator

What Sets Stellic Engineers Apart

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.

Why This 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.

We’re looking for a Lead Quality Engineer to own our company-wide quality strategy for complex enterprise software. This role is an enabling role; you’ll influence and guide multiple teams, empowering them to deliver high-quality, reliable software.

What you'll do:

• Define and drive our quality strategy: Develop a cohesive strategy that can support the combinatoric complexity that exists in our enterprise software due to: which packages / SKUs are deployed, feature flags, third-party system integrations, etc.
• Enable teams through soft influence: Use high EQ and clear communication to foster buy-in and strong execution of quality practices. Empower teams with a deep understanding of how to identify edge- and corner-cases, boundary conditions, etc.
• Automate test environments: Write code to automate the process of spinning up and tearing down AWS-based test stacks, both scheduled and on demand, accounting for multiple configurations and feature flags.
• Manage test data at scale: Develop and maintain robust methods to clone and anonymize test data from production environments, as well as generate test data (using factories, etc.) for a wide range of scenarios.
• Leverage emerging tools: Investigate and implement AI-powered end-to-end testing frameworks to enhance coverage and efficiency.

What you'll need:

• 5+ years of experience as a quality engineer operating at scale
• Strong ownership mindset and the ability to autonomously lead
• Proven experience leading quality initiatives in complex enterprise contexts
• Experience with Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, and other E2E testing frameworks
• Hands-on experience with Python, Django, Celery, Postgres, and AWS
• Demonstrated capacity to influence cross-functional teams without direct authority
• Have a high EQ and superb communication skills, both written and verbal

Bonus if You Have:

• Experience with ElasticSearch
• Experience with Dagster, Airflow, and other data orchestration tools
• Familiarity with AI-driven E2E testing tools or frameworks (e.g., Checksum.ai)

Why Join

• Be part of a customer-centric team that is addressing the core issues in higher education via an expandable platform that is overwhelming loved by students and valued by administrators
• The opportunity to join at the ground level of a promising and developing organization, and build/lead a team critically responsible for its growth
• Work and learn from some of the most prominent thought leaders in higher education and SaaS
• Be part of a culture where ownership, new ideas, and creativity is celebrated
• Generous stock options in a Series A stage startup
• Flexible, outcome-based culture
• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance
• 401K and commuter benefits
• Annual international retreats in some of the most beautiful cities & towns

Compensation:  $170,000 - $230,000 base salary, plus equity

Work location: Candidates must be willing to work in-office in San Mateo 3 days per week as part of our hybrid work culture.

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.