Head of Engineering

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.

Here are some reasons to join us as Head of Engineering Lead a rapidly growing team of A+ engineers in a well-funded company. Work at the cutting edge of interactive learning and artificial intelligence. Do meaningful work supporting child development and the foundation of human advancement. Be a leader who will shape the direction of the company.

About the Role As our Head of Engineering reporting to the CTO, you will be responsible for overseeing the implementation of Ello's technology strategy. You’ll direct our growing engineering team and partner closely with the CTO and Head of Product to lead our software development process, run engineering ops, and spearhead hiring to help accomplish our goal of building the world's first AI teacher for children.

The ideal candidate is an experienced software leader who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. You are motivated both by caring for the individual success of your team members, as well as driving the technical growth of the company.

As a manager, you value technical excellence and care about developing a strong engineering culture. You love building and shipping great products. You are motivated by the achievements of others and you measure your success by the success of your team and the people who surround you. From your experience managing engineering teams, you have acquired the pattern recognition skills to spot people issues before they turn into problems and know how to support strong engineers. You know how to run a great hiring process. You have a track record of scoping and managing complex timelines.

As an engineer and architect, you are able to act as the technical glue between people when necessary. You have no problem doing the odd code review across 7+ programming languages. You are ready to make infrastructure decisions that have critical long-lasting impacts and you are able to look forward to the longer-term implications of those decisions. Perhaps you’ve seen how they play out a scale of millions of MAUs in one of your last roles.

At Ello, we strive to build a safe working environment by building a culture of care while prioritizing technical excellence. We are looking for someone who shares our values, who brings a diverse network of talent with them, and most importantly who is committed to making a difference in the lives of children.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the co-founders to define and execute on Ello’s technology roadmap.
• Lead a growing team of engineers and ensure that they have the support and resources they need to be successful.
• Drive innovation and continuous improvement in our engineering processes.
• Lead the hiring process for all new engineers.

Required Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of engineering management experience.
• Ability to write code and run code reviews in several of the following languages: Python, TypeScript, C#, C/C++, Swift, Kotlin, Objective-C, Java.
• Track record of building and shipping products at scale.
• Experience scaling software architecture at the Series A-B level.
• Experience working with one or more cloud platforms (ideally multiple, including GCP and AWS).
• Full-stack JS experience (Node, NestJs, GraphQL, Mongo).
• Incredible communication and organization skills with the ability to manage multiple projects and prioritize effectively.
• Ability to coordinate and collaborate effectively across both local (San Francisco) and international teams (members based across the US, South America, Europe, and Africa).
• Demonstrated excellence in software engineering practices (code review processes, CI/CD pipelines, build systems, etc.)
• Familiarity with modern data & business intelligence stack (built or transitioned).

Nice to Have Experience

• Past DevOps engineering experience, including with IAC tools such as Terraform.
• A track record of maintaining systems uptime and reliability at scale; knowledge of metrics, monitoring and alerting systems, and how to run on-call rotations effectively.
• Experience architecting and building multi-system applications and services (web, cloud, system-native, mobile, etc.)
• Past full stack web development experience (React & Node.js stack).
• Past Game development experience in Unity.
• Past native mobile app development experience on iOS (ObjC/Swift) and/or Android (Java/Kotlin).
• A demonstrated interest in Machine Learning (no ML background required).

We look for candidates who

• Have something to teach us about our software process from their past success stories in engineering management.
• 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.
• Prefer open and direct communication grounded in empathy to beating around the bush.
• Want to build meaningful relationships at work.
• Take the initiative and take full ownership of their work.

About Ello Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children.

Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence, K-12 education, and child development across institutions such as Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, and more. Ello’s founders have dedicated their careers to pioneering innovation in child development and artificial intelligence. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and have recently closed a funding Series A; 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.

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.