Under the Hood: A Look at Stellic’s Technology

Since joining Stellic as Chief of Staff, I’ve spent time digging into how everything actually works, from our architecture to the algorithms behind the product. What I’ve learned is that we’ve engineered one of the most technically complex systems in higher education, and we did it with intention.

We have built high performance degree audit algorithms, near real-time integrations with legacy ERPs, elastic multi-instance architectures while maintaining strict security and reliability, and a beautiful UI to bring it all together. Every choice has been deliberate, and every solution tied to real outcomes for students and institutions.

What stands out to me is how each of these systems ladders back to a single purpose: our vision is to make every student a success story, and we are on a mission to create 10 million student success stories. To do this, we’re building systems designed to meet complexity head-on.

After spending time across teams, I’ve come to see why this domain is more complex than it appears.

Higher education looks deceptively simple, but the reality is much harder. Each institution has its own ERP setup, all the way from mainframes to cloud vendors. Every program has unique rules, and exceptions to those rules. Many campuses still rely on 24-hour batch updates, even as students and advisors need real-time data to make critical decisions. The stakes couldn’t be higher: a single miscalculated requirement can delay a student’s graduation.

Supporting the student journey means solving for complexity at every level. Each student’s path is unique, and empowering them requires products that handle exploration, planning, registration, and guidance, while also serving advisors, administrators, and faculty. That’s why the product is structured the way it is, with seven specialized product squads, each focused on a core part of the student experience.

“Degree audits are inherently complex. You are evaluating thousands of rules, edge cases, and exceptions. Brute forcing through possibilities isn't viable. And the result determines whether a student can graduate. That’s why accuracy and performance at scale are non-negotiable.”

As I learned more, three foundational systems stood out as the backbone of the platform:

• Audit Engine: Constraint aware best fit allocation instead of greedy first fit. Handles double and triple dipping, dual degrees, and exception chains.
• Elastic Architecture: Single tenant for security, multi instance for scale. Each university can scale elastically without ever sharing data.
• Platform Services: Extensible search with compound operators, workflow automation for exceptions, APIs, self-serve analytics and export frameworks.

These technical foundations power the three core modules of the Stellic platform: Progress (tracking and planning the path to graduation), Care (delivering proactive support and student success workflows), and Explore (providing credit transfer clarity for prospective students). Every module depends on the accuracy of the audit engine, the speed of integrations, and the reliability of our architecture.

A few examples stood out to me as I learned about how the product works under the hood:

• The Problem: Most degree audit systems collapse on complex requirements. They either limit functionality for complex structures, or compromise on performance.
• What We Built: A best fit engine that holds multiple downstream allocation options, then optimizes where each course belongs to maximize progress using the minimum number of courses.
• Why It Matters: Certification that used to take weeks now takes hours. Edge cases like dual degrees and substitutions are handled accurately.

“The best fit algorithm is basically an optimization engine that looks ahead across thousands of possibilities. It’s like building a solver that can handle NP-hard constraints but still respond in sub-seconds."

• The Problem: Integrations have been slow, brittle, and manual. They relied on custom SQL scripts, 24 hour lag, and heavy IT involvement.
• What We Built: The Transformer framework. It deploys directly into campus ERP systems, maps raw data into Stellic to support on-demand syncs. Data loads instantly.
• Why It Matters: IT lift becomes negligible. Advisors can now work with live data during registration and advising.

“The coolest part of the Transformer is that once it’s installed, it feels like magic. We can talk to a 20-year-old ERP in real time, auto-map data, and deliver on-demand syncs. For higher ed, that’s science fiction turned real.”

• The Problem: Stellic depends heavily on institutional data, but engineers cannot access production environments directly due to security and compliance. Reproducing issues was slow and inconsistent, often requiring support staff to act as intermediaries. This created delays, frustration for partners, and a scaling bottleneck as more institutions came online.
• What We Built: Chronoboxes. By automating secure backups of partner environments, stripping out PII, and spinning up isolated replicas on demand, engineers can now access a one-to-one clone of a partner environment in about 10 minutes. What started as a manual infra-driven workflow is now a self-service Slack-triggered process running in a secure AWS environment with built-in timeouts.
• Why It Matters: Issues that once took days to diagnose can now be reproduced and resolved in hours. Partners see faster fixes, engineers work with confidence, and the system scales with the growth of the platform. Chronoboxes turned a compliance constraint into an engineering advantage.

“Chronoboxes let us mirror a partner’s environment almost instantly. That means when an advisor or student reports an issue, we can reproduce it exactly and fix it quickly. It keeps our partners confident, and our mission on track.”

Seeing how these systems come together shows how much of the engineering is shaped by what end users need most.

• Students: Faster degree clearance, accurate audits, personalized pathways.
• Advisors: Live data during advising, automated workflows for exceptions.
• Institutions: Weeks long processes reduced to days or hours, resilience and security guaranteed. Valuable data insights that can help with resource planning and long term sustainability.

This impact shows up in NPS scores, in 95 percent customer retention targets, and in 10x outcomes on campuses. CIOs and Provosts see Stellic not as another vendor, but as a strategic partner. And that comes directly from the engineering quality and the intentionality behind it.

“What excites me is not just that we solved these problems, but that the technical breakthroughs map directly to institutional impact: retention, adoption, and ultimately student success.”

Even with this foundation, the most ambitious work is ahead:

• Frictionless Onboarding: Get an institution live in less than a day with almost no IT involvement.
• AI with Intention:
  • Chat-based advising, planning, and scheduling. Building degree requirements through natural language to simplify management. Intelligent, specific, and actionable summaries of individual students to surface those who need help.
• Scaling: We reached 500K students from our inception in 2017 to January 2025 and doubled to 1M by June. But getting to 10M will require an entirely new level of scale and intentionality.

From the outside, it’s easy to see the outcomes. But after spending time inside Stellic, I’ve come to appreciate the precision and intent that shapes everything underneath them. The audit engine, real-time pipelines, and Chronoboxes all reflect a deep commitment to solving problems the right way.

The challenge now is to carry that same intention into what comes next, while pushing ourselves to solve new kinds of problems that create step-change impact.