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
Location: San Francisco (relocation assistance provided)
Salary: $200-250k 

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 looking for a Head of Design to lead Ello’s creative vision and scale our design practice across product, marketing, and content. You’ll shape how our AI tutor looks, feels, and behaves—guiding a growing team and ensuring design excellence at every level. With engineering velocity moving faster than ever, your role is critical: we need a design culture that not only keeps up with rapid iteration, but actively fuels it. You’ll help us build a design culture that can match the ambition of Ello’s vision for innovation and growth, raising the bar for product quality, design maturity, and cross-functional collaboration

This is a high-impact, high-ownership role that blends creative vision, operational excellence, and people leadership. You will work directly with Ello’s Co-Founder & CTO, Catalin Voss, and collaborate closely with our other Co-Founders, CEO Tom Sayer and CXO Elizabeth Adams. In this role, you’ll serve as both a creative compass and a strategic leader—helping us imagine, define, and build magical learning experiences for kids around the world.

We’re looking for an experienced creative leader who thrives at the intersection of imagination and execution. You’ve shipped beautiful, high-impact products and built teams and systems that made that possible. You’re excited about working in person in San Francisco. You’re hands-on when needed. And you care deeply about creating joyful, meaningful experiences for kids.

Responsibilities

Company-Wide Creative Direction & Design Culture

• Define and maintain the creative direction and principles across Ello’s product and marketing ecosystem
• Uphold a high-quality visual bar and ensure consistency across illustration, animation, and interface design
• Lead team critiques and feedback loops to foster continuous improvement
• Build and strengthen Ello’s design culture, including training, upskilling, and mentoring team members outside of the design team (e.g. engineering and marketing**)**
• Champion design excellence across the company and help instill design thinking cross-functionally

Design Leadership across Product and Marketing

• Collaborate closely with our Product and Engineering leadership to shape product direction and user experience
• Collaborate closely with our Marketing leadership to shape our go-to-market and lifecycle marketing
• Champion a deep understanding of our users—their needs, motivations, and challenges—and ensure every experience we design is intuitive, purposeful, and grounded in real customer insight.

Project & Art Production Management

• Own creative timelines and milestone planning
• Coordinate assets across illustration, animation, and UI design workflows
• Manage and refine the art and asset production pipeline for scalability and efficiency
• Optimize the systems and processes to support smoother creative execution
• Serve as the connective tissue between creative, engineering, product, and marketing teams
• Lead clear, proactive communication across disciplines to reduce ambiguity
• Facilitate sprint planning, retros, and updates with clarity
• Anticipate and flag timeline risks, resourcing gaps, or potential blockers
• Manage contract illustrators, animators, and other vendors as needed to ensure high-quality deliverables
• Draft and oversee briefs, scopes of work, and delivery requirements for contract work

Required Experience

• 7+ years of experience in creative production, preferably across mobile apps, games, or interactive experiences
• Demonstrated ability to lead a team through multiple product cycles, from concept to delivery
• A practiced leader of visual storytelling with a strong portfolio in illustration, animation, and UI
• Comfortable managing and mentoring creative teams while being hands-on when needed
• Experienced in coordinating cross-functional teams, including artists, animators, PMs, engineers, and marketers
• Deeply organized and proactive with excellent project management skills
• Exceptional written and visual communicator with high emotional intelligence and collaborative energy
• Expertise with tools like Figma, Linear, Drive, and Notion

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience in edtech, mobile gaming, publishing, or animation
• Prior success in building and scaling creative pipelines

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.

Apply for the Job: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ello/0f20f44a-9ce3-4393-a373-5bad050401c5

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