Technical Program Manager, Machine Learning

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.

About the Role

As the Technical Program Manager for the Machine Learning team at Ello, you’ll be responsible for coordinating and managing critical machine learning projects end-to-end. You’ll partner directly with Ello’s CTO to oversee the delivery of these projects. 

This role is a great opportunity for an exceptional project/program/product manager with intense curiosity for doing work at the intersection of AI and education or an ML engineer looking to move into more cross-functional management. You’ll work with a world-class team including some of the brightest technologists in the field – the people who wrote the papers we’re implementing. You’ll have the opportunity to join regular technical advising sessions with leaders at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence, including Stanford AI professors and the research directors of industry AI labs.

Your primary job will be to empower our ML team and to  align efforts among various teams inside Ello including engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders to ensure smooth project execution. Your day-to-day activities involve running standups, creating sprint plans, timelines, and roadmaps, identifying key milestone dependencies, and allocating necessary resources.

At Ello, we like to joke that we do “research on a production schedule.” As an ideal candidate, you’re excited about the challenge of owning the production schedule part of that and thrive in a fast-paced environment. As a leader, you define your accomplishments by the success of others around you and want to be a part of a caring culture of excellence.

Required Qualifications

• 1-2+ years experience running ML-related projects streams, coordinating with an ML team and leveraging your technical expertise

• Strong project management skills, including successful examples of coordination of technical projects with an ability to effectively manage project scope, timelines and resources

• Technical background in ML, including experience with sequence data (text, audio, or video) and understanding of LLMs

• Familiarity with the ML development process and lifecycle, including model training, tuning, and on-device delivery

• Strong communication skills, able to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience working with image generation models

• Prior experience in speech recognition/ASR

• MLops experience in setting up infrastructure for large scale model training (e.g. previously owned an infrastructure migration of some sort)

• Experience with our task management stack (Notion Height, GitHub) 

We look for candidates who

• Have something to teach us.

• Want to do work they are proud of to ship products they are proud of.

• Prefer open and direct communication grounded in empathy to beating around the bush.

• Take the initiative and take full ownership of their work.

• Want to build meaningful relationships at work

• Have an urge to make a real impact on child development at scale.

Reasons to join us

• Be part of a growing but tight-knit team

• Work directly with the co-founders of a rapidly growing company

• Do meaningful work supporting child development

• Be part of an exceptional team doing exceptional work at the forefront of technological change.

About Ello

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.

_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.