Senior Product Engineer

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: Maximize the potential of every child everywhere.

Were building the worlds first AI teacher to close that gap: one that listens speaks adapts and inspires just like the best human educators.

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 using generative AI. It worksand kids love it.

Now were scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. Were building a real-time learning platformone that combines language speech and memory to power personalized interactive education for kids worldwide. Were moving fast: we ship weekly test directly with kids and families and push the boundaries of what AI can do in education.

With the resources of the worlds top investors and the heart of a public benefit corporation were here to revolutionize how children learn globally. Featured on TIMEs Best Inventions and Fortunes Change the World Ello is a small mission-driven team taking on one of the most important challenges of our time: to democratize education.

Who youll be joining

Ello is a rapidly growing series A startup focused on revolutionizing the way children learn and interact with technology. You will work directly with Ellos Co-founder & CTO Catalin Voss on a small team (<10) of engineers learning designers and PMs to develop new products. Youll be surrounded by a team of A engineers and youll work with some of the foremost experts in ML to productionize models and build new product experiences. We work in-person out of our San Francisco office and were big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

About the role

Were looking for a strong Sr. Product Engineer to independently own the build-out of learning activities as part of Ellos next-generation AI tutoring apps. You will bridge the gap between product development and engineering to own features from conception to playtest at times acting as your own product manager and at times collaborating closely with our product team. Youll be part of a small team that is responsible for bringing Ellos tutoring AI to life through agent control character development and game interactions. You pay attention to the details and thrive building products that delight users.

You can work full-stack and across multiple programming languages build chains etc. Learning yet another language doesnt feel like a daunting task at this point. You have experience with or a demonstrated curiosity for GenAI pipelines. On the backend youre able to write performant Python code and deal with complex I/O pipelines. On the frontend youre able to take an existing component library and build a rough UI from scratch (Flutter & React) without a designer or implement pixel-perfect layouts in collaboration with a designer.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds mobile engineering machine learning or design & product but we prioritize strong technical foundations and demonstrated execution speed in shipping. As an ideal candidate youll have built and shipped software products end-to-end in the past for example through an initiative you championed at a prior job through an impressive side project or as the founder of your own company. Wed love to hear about those in the interview process!

Responsibilities

• Own and build features end-to-end from concept to delivery

• Build agent-based AI pipelines interfacing with ML engineers working on core models (e.g. our child speech recognition pipeline)

• Serve as a bridge between product design and engineering moving fluidly between UX/UI and technical problem-solving

• Develop and integrate front-end components for mobile and web platforms leveraging existing design systems and brand guidelines

• Do whatever it takes to go from product conception to playtest

Required Experience

• Engineering:

  • Excellent production-grade engineering & debugging skills across backend ML and mobile frontend

  • Experience with at least one of Flutter native Android development in Java/Kotlin or iOS development in Swift/ObjC

  • Experience with ML tooling and GenAI tools (you dont need to be a linear algebra beast designing your own models but you should understand how multimodal models work and communicate with ML engineers in their language)

  • Some experience with GenAI models & pipelines including human eval infrastructure

  • Familiarity with Git flow etc.

  • Basic data science skills (enough to analyze your own product insights)

  • Familiarity with basic infrastructure setup continuous integration and production release workflows

• Design & Product:

  • Very high level of attention to detail. For example you see how small changes in a characters facial expression or the shading of a background affect the emotional impact of the end product

  • Demonstrated bias to action in product building: creating something from nothing and turning chaos into order

  • Demonstrated ability to work within existing design systems and brand standards to build new front-end components

  • Cross-functional skills; you likely either picked up engineering from a product/design domain or product skills from a computer science background

  • Familiarity with project management tools and collaborative development tools

Nice to have experience

• Experience with game development

• Experience as a product manager or in a role with significant ownership over features or components

• Deep understanding of mobile app architecture design patterns and performance optimization techniques

• Experience with designing products for children

We look for candidates who

• Have something to teach us

• Want to do work they are proud of to ship products they are proud of

• 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

• Exemplify integrity in their actions decisions and communication

• Want to build meaningful relationships at work

Here are some reasons to be a part of our team

• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI and interactive learning.

• Experience the joy of turning your designs and code into engaging and educational experiences for children worldwide

• Be part of an A team and an engineering culture of excellence

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

Required Experience:

Senior IC