About the role

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 looking for a Head of Design to lead Ello’s creative vision and scale our design practice across product, marketing, and content. You’ll shape how our AI teacher looks, feels, and behaves—guiding a growing team and ensuring design excellence at every level. With engineering velocity moving faster than ever, your role is critical: we need a design culture that not only keeps up with rapid iteration, but actively fuels it. You’ll help us build a design culture that can match the ambition of Ello’s vision for innovation and growth, raising the bar for product quality, design maturity, and cross-functional collaboration. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role that blends creative vision, operational excellence, and people leadership. You will report directly to Ello’s Co-Founder & CTO, Catalin Voss, and collaborate closely with our other Co-Founders, CEO Tom Sayer and CXO Elizabeth Adams. In this role, you’ll serve as both a creative compass and a strategic leader—helping us imagine, define, and build magical learning experiences for kids around the world. We’re looking for an experienced creative leader who thrives at the intersection of imagination and execution. You’ve shipped beautiful, high-impact products and built teams and AI-enabled systems and processes that made that possible. You’re excited about working in person in San Francisco. You’re hands-on when needed, and you see AI as critical leverage for your craft. Most of all, you care deeply about creating joyful, meaningful experiences for kids.

Responsibilities

Company-Wide Creative Direction & Design Culture

• Uphold, institutionalize, and elevate Ello’s creative direction and principles across product and marketing
• Maintain a high-quality visual bar and ensure consistency across illustration, animation, and interface design
• Lead team critiques and feedback loops to foster continuous improvement
• Build and strengthen Ello’s design culture, including training, upskilling, and mentoring team members outside the design team (e.g., engineering and marketing)
• Champion design excellence across the company and help instill design best practices cross-functionally

Design Leadership across Product and Marketing

• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering leadership to shape product direction and user experience
• Collaborate closely with Marketing leadership to shape our go-to-market and lifecycle marketing
• Champion a deep understanding of our users—their needs, motivations, and challenges—and ensure every experience we design is intuitive, purposeful, and grounded in real customer insight

Creative Operations & Production Strategy

• Set the strategic direction for how creative production is structured — including how AI tools are embedded into illustration, animation,...