Lead Quality Engineer

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 worth it.

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.

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
• Comprehensive health insurance, with Stellic covering 99% of your premium and 75% for dependents on our base plan
• 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 the Bay Area 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.