Ello

Ello’s mission is to maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. To close that gap, we’re building the world’s first AI teacher: one that listens, speaks, adapts, and inspires, just like the best human educators.   Our first product, Read with Ello, has already helped hundreds 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. It works, and kids love it.   Now, we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. Our new app combines language, speech, and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide – check it out here. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids, and push the boundaries of what AI can do in education.   About the role We’re looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join our product engineering and applied research team. Our team operates at the intersection of research and production, solving open-ended problems while delivering real-world products. We use the best tool for the job, whether that’s a novel machine learning model or plain software engineering fundamentals. You’re excited to build an AI product that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in education. You believe that great products and research strengthen each other. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy shipping AI features into a real product, designing the evaluations that prove they work, and turning fuzzy product questions into measurable experiments. You’ll make an edit in your Jupyter notebook this week, deploy it on-device next week, and watch it bring smiles to kids’ faces a day later. What You’ll Do Help define the impact of AI on children’s education. Own AI systems and features end-to-end: from identifying product opportunities, to building and operating research and evaluation systems, to shipping production improvements used by children worldwide. Collaborate with learning experts and product engineers to build infrastructure measuring the educational quality, engagement, safety, latency, and behavior of an AI teacher Design and improve the agent harness that powers Ello’s tutoring experience, including how the tutor decides what to teach next, when to intervene, and how to adapt to each child Develop learner profiling and adaptation systems that build a model of each child – their strengths, gaps, pace, and engagement patterns – and use that model to drive instructional decisions Develop feedback loops and data flywheels that continuously improve product quality through usage, evaluation, and experimentation About you Experience: 3+ years of experience building AI products in an engineering or research role. You’ve worked in environments that require you to take a high level of ownership. Software engineering fundamentals: You take pride in writing clean Python code that others can build upon. You’re able to get up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar code, work well with other engineers of varying backgrounds, and debug complex systems. You can make technical decisions with incomplete information while still maintaining high engineering standards. Evaluation and product improvement: You’ve built and operated evaluation or measurement systems, such as AI evals. You can own the loop from ambiguous product quality questions, to concrete metrics and research plans, back to production improvements. Research and experimentation: You’re comfortable with experimental thinking and reasoning through how to build systems around improving a non-deterministic product, while the underlying AI foundations shift. You can think empirically, but also make good calls in the gray area when needing to weigh conflicting signals and move quickly. Machine learning foundations: You’re able to read recent ML papers and implement parts of the stack – you don’t need deep model training expertise, but you do need to understand how they work and how to evaluate them. You have sufficient proficie

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. It works, and kids love it.   Now, we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. Our new app combines language, speech, and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide – check it out here. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids, 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 We’re hiring our first Product Manager in Kenya to help build Ello’s Nairobi hub into a strong, independent product organization. This is not a “local execution” role. This person will be a founding product leader for Ello in Kenya: someone who can understand children, families, schools, and local market dynamics deeply; translate that insight into strong product decisions; and help establish the team, systems, and operating rhythms that allow the Nairobi hub to make decisions and iterate quickly. You’ll work closely with our product, design, engineering, research, and leadership teams across Nairobi and San Francisco. You’ll own meaningful parts of the product experience end-to-end, from identifying user needs and product hypotheses, to testing with children and families, to shipping improvements that make the product better. Over time, this person should help build the foundation for a world-class product team in Kenya: one that has strong judgment, high standards, clear processes, and the ability to make decisions close to the users we serve. This is a highly autonomous role for an AI-forward product builder who is comfortable operating in ambiguity, creating structure where none exists yet, and turning real-world learning into shipped product. Exciting Things About This Role You’ll help the Nairobi hub become a strong product organization with real decision-making power. You’ll work at the intersection of AI, education, and a market that is massively underserved — and where the opportunity is enormous. You’ll build global product experiences from Nairobi, grounded in direct contact with children and families. You’ll work directly with one of Ello’s most important launch markets while shaping experiences that can scale worldwide. You’ll work on one of the most important applications of AI: helping children learn. You’ll help create processes, team culture, and product standards that can compound for years. You’ll collaborate with world-class engineers, designers, and researchers across continents. Key Requirements 3–5 years of experience in product management or closely adjacent roles (engineering, design, or UX research). Track record of shipping high-quality products from concept to launch. Hands-on experience using AI-native prototyping tools (e.g., Claude, Bolt, Replit, etc) to build quick demos, test product ideas, and accelerate workflows Strong design sense: able to recognize great UX and collaborate closely with designers to create simple, delightful experiences. Strong user insight: you are comfortable talking to users, observing behavior, identifying patterns, and turning insight into product direction. Analytical and problem-solving skills with a structured approach to decision-making. Comfortable working with technical teams and understanding syste