Machine Learning Engineer

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: Maximize the potential of every child everywhere. To close that gap were building the worlds first AI tutor: one that listens speaks adapts and inspires just like the best human teachers.

Our first product Read with Ello is already helping tens of thousands of kids each week learn to read. It listens as they read aloud offers support when they stumble and generates magical personalized stories.

Now were scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. Its a 1:1 tutor that combines language speech and memory to deliver interactive education for kids worldwide. We move fast and test directly with families to create products that kids love.

About the role

Were looking for an ML Engineer to join our 5-person applied ML team. Our team operates at the intersection of research and production solving open-ended problems while delivering real-world products. We use the best tool for the job whether thats a novel machine learning model or software engineering fundamentals.

Youre excited to build an AI product that pushes the boundaries of whats possible in education. You believe that great products and research strengthen each other. Youll thrive here if you enjoy building scalable systems from the ground up and bringing research to life in real-world products. Youll make an edit in your Jupyter notebook this week deploy it on-device next week and watch it bring smiles to kids faces a day later.

What Youll Do

• Own projects end-to-end from data through to production (e.g. conversational agents learner adaptation or speech perception)

• Collaborate with learning experts and product engineers to translate research into an AI tutor that understands adapts and interacts with children everywhere

• Build with the latest advancements in machine learning

About you

• 3 years of experience in AI/ML research or engineering preferably with speech systems or LLMs

• Proven track record across the modeling lifecycle: data acquisition experimentation evaluation and productionization

• Experience with Python deep learning frameworks and distributed computing

• Proficiency in applied mathematics and linear algebra at the level where you can contribute to research discussions with a deeply technical team

Bonus points

• Public projects that demonstrate technical creativity

• Track record of publications in top machine learning conferences (NeurIPS ICML ICLR etc.)

• Depth in low-latency inference at scale

• Strong product intuition

We look for candidates who

• Have something to teach us

• Have an urge to make a real impact on child development at scale

• Take initiative and full ownership of their work

• Prefer open and direct communication grounded in empathy to beating around the bush

• Want to build meaningful relationships at work

Who youll be joining

Ellos 5-person applied ML team includes some of the worlds foremost experts in their areas. For instance our speech perception efforts are led by the co-authors of wav2vec. At Ello theyve built the worlds best child speech recognition system beating Whisper. That ability to deeply understand child speech enables us to design magical experiences for early childhood learning. We work on a broad range of machine learning problems across agent reliability learner adaptation and multimodal perception. We collaborate closely with advisors from Stanford and top industry research labs (on a weekly basis not in some hands-off way). We work in-person out of our San Francisco office and were big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

A note on immigration

We dont shy away from sponsoring US visas and green card petitions. Our CTO and CEO have each gone through their own immigration journeys and are familiar with the challenges. We have successfully secured O-1 visas H-1B transfers etc. for Ello employees and retain top immigration counsel.

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. Were currently around 45 people headquartered in San Francisco with offices in São Paulo Brazil; Nairobi Kenya; and New York.

Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence K-12 education and child development across institutions such as Stanford Berkeley Google Apple and more. We were part of Y Combinators W20 batch and are funded by world-class investors including Goodwater Capital Homebrew Reed Hastings Common Sense Growth Ravensburger Project A Ventures Reach Capital Khosla Ventures WndrCo Visible Ventures and K9 Ventures.

Were a small collaborative team that takes each others voices very seriously. Because our mission is to support all children it is critical that our team is representative of the communities we work in; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture.

We feel enormously privileged to be one of the few companies that has the opportunity to take a shot at truly revolutionizing education with AI at this inflection point in technology. We dont take it for granted so we work quite hard to turn that vision into reality with urgency. We want to create an environment in which we can all be our best selves use our strengths to take Ello forward and develop our own skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things that were proud of and we believe its possible to do both.

At Ello diversity is a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate based on race religion skin color national origin gender sexual orientation age marital status veteran status or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to assess skills and experience directly. If you need accommodations throughout the interview process please contact