Tech Lead, GenAI & Machine Learning

1 Month ago • 5-7 Years • Artificial Intelligence • $165,000 PA - $220,000 PA

Job Summary

Job Description

Ello seeks a Tech Lead for their GenAI & Machine Learning team. This role involves leading the architecture design for all ML and GenAI efforts, bridging AI application development with third-party and proprietary models. Responsibilities include overseeing model development and deployment, mentoring team members, setting ML ops standards, building AI-first product development processes, and collaborating with other engineering teams. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of ML engineering/research experience, 2+ years with GenAI product development, and experience building and scaling ML systems. Experience with large language models, distributed pipelines, and Kubernetes is crucial. The role requires strong leadership, technical expertise, and a passion for impacting child development.
Must have:
  • 5+ years ML engineering/research experience
  • 2+ years GenAI product development experience
  • Experience building and scaling ML systems
  • Expertise with large language models & Kubernetes
  • Lead and mentor ML team members
  • Oversee model development and deployment
Good to have:
  • Voice AI stack and audio pipeline development experience
  • GPU cluster setup experience
  • Full-stack web development workflow familiarity
  • On-device systems experience
  • C/C++ or similar low-level deployment experience
  • Mobile OS and I/O pipeline experience
Perks:
  • Work at the cutting edge of AI and interactive learning
  • Contribute to impactful child development work
  • Collaboration with top researchers
  • Well-funded, rapidly growing company
  • Visa sponsorship available

Job Details

Engineering, Full-Time

San Francisco, CA

Salary range: $165,000 - $220,000 + Equity

At Ello, our mission is to maximize the potential of all children. Our first product, Read with Ello, is an AI reading teacher that listens to children read out loud. Ello uses speech recognition to help them when they get stuck, makes up stories using generative AI, and inspires a love for reading.

We’re now building on the success of Read with Ello and putting together the pieces of the world’s first complete AI teacher for all children. Together, we believe we can close the primary school education gap worldwide.

Ello has been recognized on Fortune’s “Change the World” and Time’s 2024 Best Inventions lists. We are well-funded, backed by world-class investors, and ready to recruit new talent to help us achieve our vision.

Who you’ll be joining

Ello’s 5-person Machine Learning team includes some of the world’s foremost experts in their areas. To give one example, 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 understand child speech reliably enables us to unlock the power of generative AI tools for early childhood learning. We work on a broad range of machine learning problems across multimodal machine learning, NLP, image generation, and speech 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.

About the role

As the Tech Lead on the ML team, you will work closely with the Co-Founder & CTO to lead the architecture design for all our ML and GenAI efforts. You will be successful in this role if you have a strong foundational understanding of AI models but ultimately care deeply about turning research outputs into magical real-world product experiences. Most importantly, you are excited about the opportunity to make a real impact on child development at scale.

Your role will bridge AI application development with third-party models and internal ML development leveraging our proprietary models and data.

  • Machine learning: You should have foundational knowledge in ML. You will oversee MLops in collaboration with our Platform team and set good standards for your colleagues on critical design questions around dataset management, experiment tracking, and distributed training infrastructure. You will also get into the weeds as an IC and implement state-of-the-art machine learning systems.

  • AI Applications: You will lead the charge on bringing best practices to our AI-first product development process. You’ll scale our evaluation infrastructure for applications spanning complex use cases – reading instruction, story generation, and interactive dialogue-based teaching. You’ll design clean programming interfaces and build an internal SDK for our product engineering team. 

Responsibilities

  • Oversee the development and deployment of machine learning models to production environments

  • Lead by example, fostering a culture of excellence in architecture, coding, and model development 

  • Provide guidance, regular feedback, education, and mentoring to other members of the ML team

  • Monitor and maintain deployed models and data pipelines

  • Independently lead research work streams as part of Ello’s ML team

  • Lead collaboration with platform and frontend engineers as well as TPM and data team on data collection, pipeline design, model training, and deployment

  • Continuously learn and stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI and machine learning engineering

Required Experience

  • 5+ years of experience as an ML engineer/researcher working with modern Machine Learning toolkits (Python stack, very comfortable with PyTorch)

  • 2+ years of experience with GenAI product development (pipeline design, serving, prompt management, fine-tuning, evaluation, etc.), with some evidence shipping real world products using the most recent tools

  • 3+ years of experience building, scaling, and optimizing ML systems

  • Experience setting up ML ops workflows and infrastructure from scratch in a startup environment (ideally in Terraform on AWS)

  • Production programming experience on a data-intensive project in distributed infrastructure

  • Experience deploying distributed data and training pipelines on Kubernetes

  • Experience with large language models

  • Experience writing high-performance, parallelized code

  • Applied mathematics and linear algebra proficiency at the level at which you can contribute to research discussions with a deeply technical team

  • Very accustomed to agile software engineering processes, git flow, etc.

Nice to have experience

  • Experience with voice AI stacks and audio pipeline development

  • Prior experience setting up GPU clusters (e.g. previously set up SLURM, or built multi-cloud model training pipelines with Infrastructure-as-Code)

  • Some familiarity with basic full-stack web development workflows and frontend API interaction

  • 2+ years of experience leading teams developing ML solutions

  • On-device systems experience

    • An understanding of low-level build pipelines and deployment experience in C/C++ or similar

    • Experience working with mobile operating systems and I/O pipelines in resource-constrained environments

    • Experience with optimizing neural networks to perform well on low-power mobile platforms (e.g. pruning, distillation, quantization)

  • Signal processing background

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

  • Help lead a small but rapidly growing team of A+ engineers in a well-funded company

  • Work at the cutting edge of interactive learning and artificial intelligence

  • Stay plugged in with the research community while building real-world products

  • Do meaningful work supporting child development that you can witness firsthand during in-office playtests. Make an edit in your jupyter notebook this week, deploy it on-device in C++ next week, and watch it bring smiles to kids’ faces a day later

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, we view diversity as a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, skin color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to directly assess skills and experience. If you need any accommodations throughout the interview process, please reach out to jackie@ello.com.

Compensation Range: $165K - $220K

Similar Jobs

G5 games - 2D UI/UX Artist

G5 games

(Remote)
1 Month ago
playrix  - Feature Owner (LiveOps)

playrix

Armenia (Remote)
7 Months ago
bosh group india - Applied Computer Vision Engineer- Automated Driving

bosh group india

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India (On-Site)
2 Months ago
G5 games - 2D UI/UX Artist (Hidden objects project)

G5 games

Tbilisi, Tbilisi, Georgia (Remote)
4 Months ago
Cadence - Design Engineer II

Cadence

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India (On-Site)
3 Days ago
Canva - Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Photo AI

Canva

Prague, Czechia (Remote)
4 Months ago
Microsoft - Member of Technical Staff – Voice & Vision

Microsoft

Mountain View, California, United States (Hybrid)
2 Months ago
The Walt Disney Company - Lead Software Engineer - Applied AI

The Walt Disney Company

Santa Monica, California, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
bytedance - Senior Research Scientist, Foundation Model, Speech Understanding

bytedance

Seattle, Washington, United States (On-Site)
7 Months ago
bytedance - Research Scientist, Responsible AI

bytedance

San Jose, California, United States (On-Site)
2 Months ago

Get notifed when new similar jobs are uploaded

Similar Skill Jobs

bytedance - Software Engineer, Inference

bytedance

San Jose, California, United States (On-Site)
7 Months ago
G5 games - 2D UI/UX Artist

G5 games

(Remote)
1 Month ago
Thousand Eyes - Lead Software Engineer II, Machine Learning

Thousand Eyes

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)
2 Weeks ago
Scale AI - Machine Learning Engineer, GenAI Applied ML

Scale AI

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
playrix  - Feature Owner (LiveOps)

playrix

Cyprus (Remote)
7 Months ago
Jane Street - Machine Learning Engineer

Jane Street

New York, United States (On-Site)
5 Days ago
playrix  - Junior Game Designer

playrix

Ireland (Remote)
2 Months ago
bytedance - Video Analysis and Quality Algorithm Engineer

bytedance

Seattle, Washington, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
Qualcomm - Senior ML Compiler Engineer

Qualcomm

Hyderabad, Telangana, India (On-Site)
5 Days ago
Reddit - Principal Machine Learning Engineer - Large Scale Embedding

Reddit

United States (Remote)
2 Weeks ago

Get notifed when new similar jobs are uploaded

Jobs in San Francisco, California, United States

Whatnot - Tech Lead Manager, Fraud & Risk Engineering

Whatnot

Los Angeles, California, United States (On-Site)
1 Week ago
Saviynt - Software Architect - Privilege Access Management

Saviynt

United States (Remote)
7 Months ago
Visa - Director, Change Management

Visa

Ashburn, Virginia, United States (Hybrid)
3 Weeks ago
The Walt Disney Company - Security Officer (Part-Time)

The Walt Disney Company

Burbank, California, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
SimpliSafe - Security Monitoring Specialist

SimpliSafe

Richmond, Virginia, United States (On-Site)
2 Weeks ago
DailyWire - Social Platform Specialist, Reddit

DailyWire

Nashville, Tennessee, United States (On-Site)
3 Weeks ago
Zscaler - RF Requirements and Standards Architect

Zscaler

San Diego, California, United States (On-Site)
2 Weeks ago
IMC - HR Business Partner - Trading

IMC

Chicago, Illinois, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
Ansys - Account Representative

Ansys

Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, United States (On-Site)
3 Weeks ago
Google - Software Engineer III, Security/Privacy, Google Cloud Compute Infrastructure

Google

Sunnyvale, California, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago

Get notifed when new similar jobs are uploaded

Artificial Intelligence Jobs

NVIDIA - Senior Software Engineer - Conversational AI

NVIDIA

Pune, Maharashtra, India (On-Site)
2 Months ago
Netomi - Implementation Consultant

Netomi

United States (Remote)
7 Months ago
bytedance - Research Scientist in Foundation Model (Speech & Audio Generation) - 2025 Start (PhD)

bytedance

Seattle, Washington, United States (On-Site)
7 Months ago
Google - Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI

Google

Kraków, Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland (On-Site)
1 Month ago
Genies - Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, 3D Model Inference & Deployment

Genies

San Mateo, California, United States (On-Site)
2 Months ago
Google - Software Developer III, AI/ML GenAI

Google

New York, New York, United States (On-Site)
1 Month ago
Rackspace Technology - AI/ML Architect

Rackspace Technology

Vietnam (Remote)
2 Months ago
Pika - Summer Research Internship

Pika

Palo Alto, California, United States (On-Site)
3 Months ago
Passive Logic - AI Control Theory & Optimization Scientist

Passive Logic

Salt Lake City, Utah, United States (On-Site)
5 Months ago
Microsoft - Member of Technical Staff, Platform Engineer

Microsoft

Redmond, Washington, United States (Hybrid)
1 Month ago

Get notifed when new similar jobs are uploaded

About The Company

At Ello, our mission is to maximize the potential of all children. Our first product, Read with Ello, is an AI reading teacher that listens to children read out loud. Ello uses speech recognition to help them when they get stuck, makes up stories using generative AI, and inspires a love for reading. We’re now building on the success of Read with Ello and putting together the pieces of the world’s first complete AI teacher for all children. Together, we believe we can close the primary school education gap worldwide.

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

San Francisco, California, United States (On-Site)

São Paulo, State Of São Paulo, Brazil (Hybrid)

View All Jobs

Get notified when new jobs are added by Ello

Level Up Your Career in Game Development!

Transform Your Passion into Profession with Our Comprehensive Courses for Aspiring Game Developers.

Job Common Plug