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.

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: Maximize the potential of every child, everywhere.

We’re building the world’s first AI teacher to close that gap: one that listens, speaks, adapts, and inspires, just like the best human educators.

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 using generative AI. It works—and kids love it.

Now, we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. We’re building a real-time learning platform—one that combines language, speech, and memory to power personalized, interactive education for kids worldwide. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids and families, and push the boundaries of what AI can do in education.

With the resources of the world's top investors and the heart of a public benefit corporation, we’re here to revolutionize how children learn globally. Featured on TIME’s Best Inventions and Fortune’s Change the World, Ello is a small, mission-driven team taking on one of the most important challenges of our time: to democratize education.

About the Role

This role will be our first dedicated support hire in Kenya, and will build the foundations that ensure every family’s experience reflects Ello’s mission to maximize each child’s potential. This role will start as a part-time contract at 20 hours per week, but we expect it to grow over time.

This is not a traditional customer service role. You won’t just respond to messages — you’ll help set up how support operates locally from the ground up.

You will:

• Provide warm, high-quality support via WhatsApp and email
• Surface product insights from real customer conversations
• Build and document clear support workflows and templates
• Use AI tools to improve speed, clarity, and consistency
• Spot repetitive work and propose automation solutions
• Continuously improve systems as support volume grows

We are looking for someone who genuinely cares about people and takes pride in clear, warm communication — and who also gets curious about how to make work smarter and more efficient.

This role is about building strong foundations for support in Nairobi while delivering excellent day-to-day service.

Required Qualifications

• Strong written communication skills with a warm, professional tone
• Demonstrated experience in customer support, community management, operations, or similar roles
• Experience turning customer feedback into structured recommendations for product or operational improvement
• Strong AI fluency and a demonstrated ability to apply AI tools to real operational workflows
• Strong fluency with digital tools and ability to quickly learn new platforms
• Experience handling ambiguity and helping define process where it doesn’t yet exist
• Ability to stay calm and solution-oriented when customers are frustrated
• High ownership and ability to work independently

Nice to Have

• Experience supporting consumer technology products
• Experience in edtech or working with families
• Experience setting up or improving support workflows (e.g., tagging systems, macros, SOPs)
• Experience suggesting or prototyping lightweight automations in support tools
• Experience using Intercom
• Startup experience

We look for candidates who

• Genuinely enjoy helping people and solving problems
• Communicate with warmth, empathy, clarity, and strong judgment
• See support conversations as a source of product learning, not just problem resolution
• Proactively use AI to reduce manual, repetitive work and improve speed, quality, and efficiency
• Take initiative rather than waiting for detailed instructions
• Are comfortable building structure where none exists yet
• Care about quality and take pride in doing things well from the start

Reasons to join us

• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI and interactive learning
• Do meaningful work supporting child development
• Be part of a fast-growing and tight-knit team
• Help shape how customer support is built for a new product from the ground up

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We’re currently around 50 people, headquartered in San Francisco with another office in Nairobi, Kenya.

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