Senior Product Engineer

Job type Full-time Role Engineering, Full stack Experience 3+ years Visa Will sponsor

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 using generative AI. It works—and kids love it. Now, we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher for all children. We’re building a real-time learning platform—one that combines language, speech, and memory to power personalized, interactive education for kids worldwide. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids and families, 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.

Who you’ll be joining

Ello is a rapidly growing, series A startup focused on revolutionizing the way children learn and interact with technology. You will work directly with Ello’s Co-founder & CTO, Catalin Voss, on a small team (<10) of engineers, learning designers, and PMs to develop new products. You’ll be surrounded by a team of A+ engineers and you’ll work with some of the foremost experts in ML to productionize models and build new product experiences. We work in-person out of our San Francisco office and we’re big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

About the role

We’re looking for a strong Sr. Product Engineer to independently own the build-out of learning activities as part of Ello’s next-generation AI tutoring apps. You will bridge the gap between product development and engineering to own features from conception to playtest, at times acting as your own product manager, and at times collaborating closely with our product team. You’ll be part of a small team that is responsible for bringing Ello’s tutoring AI to life through agent control, character development, and game interactions. You pay attention to the details and thrive building products that delight users. You can work full-stack and across multiple programming languages, build chains, etc. Learning yet another language doesn’t feel like a daunting task at this point. You have experience with or a demonstrated curiosity for GenAI pipelines. On the backend, you’re able to write performant Python code and deal with complex I/O pipelines. On the frontend, you’re able to take an existing component library and build a rough UI from scratch (Flutter & React) without a designer or implement pixel-perfect layouts in collaboration with a designer. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds – mobile engineering, machine learning, or design & product – but we prioritize strong technical foundations and demonstrated execution speed in shipping. As an ideal candidate, you’ll have built and shipped software products end-to-end in the past, for example through an initiative you championed at a prior job, thorough an impressive side project, or as the founder of your own company. We’d love to hear about those in the interview process!

Responsibilities

Own and build features end-to-end,

from concept to delivery

Build agent-based AI pipelines,

interfacing with ML engineers working on core models (e.g., our child speech recognition pipeline)

Serve as a bridge between product design and engineering,

moving fluidly between UX/UI and technical problem-solving

Develop and integrate front-end components for mobile and web platforms,

leveraging existing design systems and brand guidelines

Do whatever it takes to go from product conception to playtest

Required Experience

Engineering:
Excellent production-grade engineering & debugging skills across backend,

ML, and mobile frontend

Experience with at least one of Flutter,

native Android development in Java/Kotlin, or iOS development in Swift/ObjC

Experience with ML tooling and GenAI tools (you don’t need to be a linear algebra beast designing your own models but should understand how multimodal models work and communicate with ML engineers in their language)
Some experience with GenAI models & pipelines including human eval infrastructure
Familiarity with Git flow etc.
Basic data science skills (enough to analyze your own product insights)
Familiarity with basic infrastructure setup,

continuous integration & production release workflows

Design & Product:
Very high level of attention to detail (e.g., noticing how small changes in character facial expression or background shading affect emotional impact)
Demonstrated bias to action in product building: creating something from nothing & turning chaos into order
Demonstrated ability to work within existing design systems & brand standards to build new front-end components
Cross-functional skills; likely picked up engineering from product/design domain or product skills from computer science background
Familiarity with project management tools & collaborative development tools

Nice to have experience

Experience with game development
Experience as a product manager or in role with significant ownership over features/components
Deep understanding of mobile app architecture/design patterns/performance optimization techniques
Experience designing products for children

We look for candidates who

Have something to teach us
Want to do work they are proud of & ship products they are proud of
Have an urge to make real impact on child development at scale
Take initiative & full ownership of their work
Prefer open & direct communication grounded in empathy over beating around the bush
Exemplify integrity in actions/decisions/communication
Want to build meaningful relationships at work

Here are some reasons to be a part of our team

Dive deep into rapidly evolving world of AI & interactive learning
Experience joy turning designs/code into engaging educational experiences for children worldwide
Be part of an A+ team & engineering culture of excellence

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children.Were currently around45 people headquartered in San Franciscowith offices in S o Paulo (Brazil), Nairobi (Kenya),45and New York. Our team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence K-12 education & child development across institutions such as Stanford Berkeley Google Apple & more. We were part of Y Combinator's W20 batch funded by world-class investors including Goodwater Capital Homebrew Reed Hastings Common Sense Growth Ravensburger Project A Ventures Reach Capital Khosla Ventures WndrCo Visible Ventures K9 Ventures. We small collaborative team that takes each others voices seriously because our mission is supporting all children; it is critical our team represents communities we work in; we emphasize diversity & inclusion. We feel privileged being one few companies taking shot at truly revolutionizing education w/ AI at this inflection point; we work hard turning vision into reality urgently; want environment where all can be best selves use strengths take Ello forward develop skills; want fun while working hard doing impactful things we're proud believe possible both.