AIML Engineer

Ellos mission is to maximize the potential of every child everywhere. To close that gap were building the worlds first AI teacher: one that listens speaks adapts and inspires just like the best human educators.

Our first product Read with Ello has already helped hundreds 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. It works and kids love it.

Now were scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. Our new app combines language speech and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide check it out here. Were moving fast: we ship weekly test directly with kids and push the boundaries of what AI can do in education.

About the role

Were looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join our product engineering and applied research 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 plain 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 shipping AI features into a real product designing the evaluations that prove they work and turning fuzzy product questions into measurable experiments. 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

• Help define the impact of AI on childrens education.

• Own AI systems and features end-to-end: from identifying product opportunities to building and operating research and evaluation systems to shipping production improvements used by children worldwide.

• Collaborate with learning experts and product engineers to build infrastructure measuring the educational quality engagement safety latency and behavior of an AI teacher

• Design and improve the agent harness that powers Ellos tutoring experience including how the tutor decides what to teach next when to intervene and how to adapt to each child

• Develop learner profiling and adaptation systems that build a model of each child their strengths gaps pace and engagement patterns and use that model to drive instructional decisions

• Develop feedback loops and data flywheels that continuously improve product quality through usage evaluation and experimentation

About you

• Experience: 3 years of experience building AI products in an engineering or research role. Youve worked in environments that require you to take a high level of ownership.

• Software engineering fundamentals: You take pride in writing clean Python code that others can build upon. Youre able to get up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar code work well with other engineers of varying backgrounds and debug complex systems. You can make technical decisions with incomplete information while still maintaining high engineering standards.

• Evaluation and product improvement: Youve built and operated evaluation or measurement systems such as AI evals. You can own the loop from ambiguous product quality questions to concrete metrics and research plans back to production improvements.

• Research and experimentation: Youre comfortable with experimental thinking and reasoning through how to build systems around improving a non-deterministic product while the underlying AI foundations shift. You can think empirically but also make good calls in the gray area when needing to weigh conflicting signals and move quickly.

• Machine learning foundations: Youre able to read recent ML papers and implement parts of the stack you dont need deep model training expertise but you do need to understand how they work and how to evaluate them. You have sufficient proficiency in applied mathematics and linear algebra to contribute to research discussions.

• AI-forward workflow: you have a working practice of leveraging AI in your engineering workflows and an active curiosity in how AI is transforming work.

Bonus points

• Public projects that demonstrate technical creativity

• Strong product intuition you can tell whats worth measuring and what isnt

• Depth in low-latency inference at scale

• Experience with model training

• Familiarity with speech systems

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. We work on a broad range of machine learning problems across agent reliability learner adaptation evaluation and multimodal perception including building the worlds best child speech recognition system designed by co-authors of wav2vec. 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

If you already have work authorization in the US were open to sponsorship depending on your situation. 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 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 another office in Nairobi Kenya.

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:

IC