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 a child read from real books. It uses evidence-based reading instruction to help them when they get stuck and behavioral psychology to motivate them to keep going. 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 children.

We’re a highly technical team building delightful learner-centered experiences which leverage the massive recent advances in AI. Our products put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours. Together, we believe we can close literacy and educational gaps around the world. We are backed by world-class investors, just closed a Series A, and we’re ready to bring on new talent to help achieve our vision.

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 have recently closed a funding round; previously announced investors include leading US and European VCs including Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, Homebrew, WndrCo, Human Capital 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 wider community; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture. 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 – we believe it’s possible to do both.

Design | Full-Time

San Francisco

Salary range: $140,000 - $190,000 + 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. Backed by world-class investors, we’re a fast-moving team with a big vision – and we’re just getting started.

About the role

We’re building the world’s first fully agentic AI tutor for kids, and we’re looking for a full-stack designer who will work end‑to‑end across character & interaction design, illustrations, mobile UI/UX, brand, and web assets, owning ideas from sketch to playtest to polished handoff. An ideal candidate will be equally comfortable PM’ing their work and collaborating tightly with engineering, research, content, and leadership. You love a strong feedback culture, can clearly explain the “why” behind your decisions, and you’re excited about working in-person in San Francisco and attending playtests to see the impact of your work. Most importantly, you are excited about making an impact on early education at scale and have a clear reason for wanting to design for children.

A portfolio submission is required for the application. While competitive candidates will likely have a proven track record in producing polished, high-quality work with real-world product impact, we are very open to opportunistic submissions – we love to see beautiful work.

Responsibilities

• Lead end‑to‑end design for new kid‑facing product features and experiments: concept → storyboard → prototype → playtest → final assets and handoff.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to create cohesive, user-centered designs that appeal to children
• Produce production‑ready Figma files and partner closely with engineering on implementation, QA, and polish
• Work in a fast-paced, iterative design environment; rapidly prototype ideas, test them out, and refine or discard
• Communicate design rationale and tradeoffs clearly; contribute and respond to design critiques with empathy and candor

Required Experience

• Broad design expertise across a variety of mediums, including UI/UX, graphic design, and product design
• Ability to drive the product creation process: organize work, set milestones, and deliver from concept to high‑quality handoff
• Demonstrated experience designing for children and families or a compelling reason you want to serve this audience
• Demonstrated track record of innovation and creativity in contributing to the product development process
• Strength in communication & feedback: clear storytelling, design rationale tied to user motivations and business impact; comfortable giving/receiving critiques
• Proficiency in both low and high-fidelity prototyping, and comfort with fast iteration cycles
• Mastery of Figma and standard design tools, attention to detail, and “pixel‑perfect” execution.
• Experience thriving in a dynamic, fast-paced work environment and adapting to project changes on the fly

Nice to have experience

• Previous experience with designing children’s products and an understanding of creating engaging visuals for young audiences.
• Comfortable drawing in multiple mediums for ideation & iteration (e.g. line-drawing & vector art alike.
• Hands‑on experience creating character‑centric experiences using illustration and basic animation/motion (e.g., game or interactive contexts)

We look for candidates who

• Have something to teach us
• Have immense attention to detail
• 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

• Immerse yourself in a collaborative environment
• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of educational AI products
• Experience the joy of turning your designs into engaging and educational experiences for children worldwide
• Work in tandem with curriculum experts, product teams, and the world’s best engineers to harness the full power of AI to reimagine education

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 crucial that our team reflects the communities in which we work; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity within our team and fostering inclusion in our culture.

Apply for the Job: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ello/48ac4652-a98f-4fb9-aa40-6fda716a23bd

Our stack spans across various technologies, from custom-built in-house real-time ML models, to our consumer-facing mobile app, to internal infrastructure and tools. An overview of the different parts of our tech stack:

AI/Machine Learning

• Custom built child speech recognition model for real-time inference, written in C++
• Python libraries for ML prototyping and training (Pytorch, TensorFlow, sklearn, etc.)
• Infrastructure running continuous model training & fine tuning on GCP/AWS
• Applied state-of-the-art AI foundation models for adaptive applications & generative content

Mobile App

• Ello mobile app built using Unity (running on iOS/Android/Kindle).
• Custom bridging interface connecting Unity app front-end with on-device child speech model & service (ObjC/Swift on iOS and Java/Kotlin on Android)

Web Frontend

• Customer-facing and internal web portals written in React

Backend

• NestJS backend using MongoDB
• GraphQL API served over Apollo