Unity Engineering Manager

At Ello, our mission is to unlock the limitless potential within all children. We build learner-centered experiences, which put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours.

Ello’s founders have dedicated their careers to pioneering child development at Stanford, Google, and their own successful startups. We were part of Y Combinator’s W20 batch and have just raised a seed round from leading US and European VCs including Human Capital, Project A Ventures, Reach Capital, Khosla Ventures, Homebrew, WndrCo, and K9 Ventures.

About the Role

As Ello’s Unity Engineering Manager, you’ll spearhead our transition from reactive app development to character-imperative game development in Unity. You’ll run and grow our game development team and make key architectural decisions. This is a perfect role for an experienced engineering manager who is itching to get back into the code with a smaller team or a lead engineer with a strong mentorship track record who is looking to take on more management responsibility in the months to come.

You’ll be responsible for bringing Ello’s tutoring AI to life. As an ideal candidate, you’re passionate about character development and game interactions. You want to build products that delight users. You see how small changes in the facial expressions of a character or the shading of the background affect the emotional impact of the things you create. You have experience working with 2D animation in Unity. You know how to structure a project well and love setting up infrastructure from scratch.

You thrive working in a fast-paced early-stage environment. You enjoy teaching other developers that are just getting started with Unity and value mentorship. You’ll eagerly show us the tricks of your favorite IDE and the intricacies of your workflow. You’ll lead the way both as an architect and by setting an example as an individual contributor who writes great C# code.

Most importantly, you are excited about the opportunity of making an impact on child development at scale.

Required Experience

• 6+ years of Unity game development experience
• A track record of shipping 2D games on mobile platforms
• Some native mobile app development experience on iOS (ObjC/Swift) and/or Android (Java/Kotlin)
• Strong programming skills, comfortable with multiple programming languages, including lower-level C/C++/C#
• Understanding the performance implications of your code at a systems level
• Familiar with at least one scripting language (ideally Python or maybe Ruby)
• Some familiarity with basic full stack web development workflows and frontend API interaction
• Very accustomed to agile software engineering processes, git flow, etc.

Desired Experience

• Experience integrating existing C++ code into Unity projects and managing efficient real-time interfaces to signal processing code
• Experience writing high-performance, parallelized code
• Strong ability to read React/React Native code, perhaps through prior experience working on a JavaScript frontend project
• Basic design skills; some experience using basic design tools to convey your ideas and make small asset adjustments (Figma, Photoshop, some animation tool)
• Experience with product analytics from query to visualization

We look for candidates who

• Have an urge to make a real impact on child development at scale
• Want to do work they are proud of and to ship products they are proud of
• Value open and honest communication that is grounded in empathy
• Want to build meaningful relationships at work
• Take the initiative and take full ownership of their work
• Balance big-picture perspective with attention to detail and creating experiences that will delight our users

Here are some reasons to join us

• Be part of a rapidly growing tight-knit team with the chance to have a big voice
• Tremendous opportunity to become a leader in the company on the back of demonstrated success
• Do meaningful work supporting child development
• Be part of an exceptional engineering team, doing exceptional engineering work

What You’ll Be Building

Reading is the gateway to learning but unfortunately, many children do not receive the individualized support they need to become confident, capable and engaged readers. This creates a cycle where they find reading frustrating and, by avoiding it, fall further behind. Parents want to take action, but they don’t have the experience or time. Enter Ello, an expert coach that makes reading fun and breaks this cycle.

Our first product is an AI reading coach 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.

Who You’ll Be Joining

We’re a small, collaborative, currently 15-person 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 building an inclusive 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.