Machine Learning Engineer

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.

About the role

We’re 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 that’s a novel machine learning model or software engineering fundamentals.

You’re excited to build an AI product that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in education. You believe that great products and research strengthen each other. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy building scalable systems from the ground up and bringing research to life in real-world products. You’ll 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 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

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 you’ll be joining

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.

A note on 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.

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 don’t 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 we’re proud of – and we believe it’s 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 recruiting@ello.com.