Job Details

Base Pay Range

$150,000.00/yr – $200,000.00/yr

Mission

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: Maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. To close that gap, we're building the world's 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, we're scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. It's 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.

What You'll 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

About the Team

Ello's 5-person applied ML team includes some of the world's foremost experts in their areas. For instance, our speech perception efforts are led by the co-authors of wav2vec. At Ello, they've built the world's 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 we're big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

Immigration

We don't 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. We're 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 Combinator's 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. We're a small, collaborative team that takes each other's 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.

Compensation

Compensation Range: $150,000 – $200,000

EEO Statement

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 ...@ello.com.