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.

We are a fast-growing edtech company on a mission to make the world’s first AI tutor, giving every child an unfair advantage.

Our product is a new kind of learning app for children ages 4–8. Children are guided by a friendly AI character to learn in a delightful, highly personalized way across multiple subjects via voice interaction. We are building from the ground up, and every lesson matters. We’re looking for creative and thoughtful learning designers who can work with our subject matter experts to help us design meaningful, engaging activities. 

Responsibilities:

• Create high-quality images, animations, and video clips using AI tools (Midjourney, Sora, Veo3, RunwayML, Stable Diffusion, etc.)
• Edit and assemble AI-generated content into polished final videos
• Design scalable interactions using the skillset our AI agent has available. 
• You will be given lesson objectives and a lesson outline. You will create engaging images and short videos according to the requirements. See example here. 
• Work with a subject matter expert to design engaging learning activities for children that balance challenge and fun, and real-world scenarios.

Who You Are:

• Expert in video, song, and text generation tools (Sora, Veo, Suno, ChatGPT etc.)
• You have a strong design sensibility and effectively leverage AI tools to bring your vision to lif
• You have a portfolio that showcases your work—whether that’s AI video, generated images either education or non-education related. 
• You enjoy using AI tools to streamline your workflow. 
• You’re excited to help kids learn.
• You’re energized by zero-to-one environments and iterate quickly based on real product feedback.
• You have experience teaching children and understand how to break down learning any subject into accessible, joyful steps. 
• You’re a fast learner and comfortable using new tools.
• You’re self-directed, collaborative, and open to trying new things.

Nice to Have:

• Background in math, early literacy, ESL, or bilingual education.
• Experience in content creation (e.g., social platforms, children’s media) with strong engagement.
• Familiarity with instructional design or child development principles.

Why Join Us?

• Help shape a product that could change how millions of children learn.
• Collaborate with a creative, mission-driven team focused on building with care and experimentation.
• Flexible, remote work with async collaboration.

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 seriously. Because our mission is to support all children, our team must be 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 with 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 urgently to turn that vision into reality. We want to create an environment where we can all be our best selves, use our strengths to take Ello forward, and develop our skills. We want to have fun while working hard to do impactful things we’re proud of – and we believe it’s possible to do both.

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