Engineering, full-time

Nairobi, Kenya (in-person)

Mid-level salary range: $53,300-$61,500 + Equity (Contract option to start)

Senior-level salary range: $70,725-$85,000 + Equity (Contract option to start)

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 children read out loud. Ello uses speech recognition to help them when they get stuck, makes up stories using generative AI, and inspires a love for reading.

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 all children. Together, we believe we can close the primary school education gap worldwide.

Ello has been recognized on Fortune’s “Change the World” and Time’s 2024 Best Inventions lists. We are well-funded, backed by world-class investors, and ready to recruit new talent to help us achieve our vision.

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, in a small group (<10) of engineers, learning designers, and PMs developing new products. Our team includes some of the world’s foremost experts in their areas. The Nairobi engineers work out of our Parklands office, and we’re big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

About the role

We’re looking for a Mobile Engineer to join a new product initiative on our journey to build the world’s first real AI tutor for all children. You’ll play a pivotal role in the development of a new app, which we’re starting to build in Flutter. We’re not Flutter natives, so you’ll help bring our team up to speed.

We’re building a new kind of app – one where the AI controls the UX rather than the other way around – in order to deliver a groundbreaking learning experience. You’re excited about that challenge and the opportunity to work alongside ML experts and learning scientists.

As a Mobile Engineer, you likely already have experience shipping products across iOS and Android and perhaps one or more cross-platform frameworks (Flutter, ideally, but maybe also React Native or Unity). You know the pros and cons of these platforms, but you could be comfortable with any of them, if the job required it. You know how to structure a project well and love setting up infrastructure from scratch. You champion excellent development practices across the team.

You’ll be responsible for working with Ello’s team of ML, platform, and Unity engineers to bring our tutoring AI to life. You care deeply about building products that delight users and will get excited about character development and game interactions.

Most importantly, you are excited about the opportunity to make an impact on early child education at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance Flutter applications for iOS and Android platforms

• Debug & optimize Flutter apps for performance on very low-power, memory constrained devices

• Collaborate with design and animation teams 

• Implement best practices for code quality, testing, and version control

• Stay up-to-date with the latest Flutter developments, trends, and industry best practices

Required Experience

• 3+ years of experience in mobile app development, with at least 2 years of hands-on experience with Flutter and native app development experience (Java/Kotlin, Swift/Objective-C in addition to Dart)

• Proficient in Dart programming language and its ecosystem

• Strong understanding of mobile app architecture, design patterns, and performance optimization techniques

• Familiarity with backend integration patterns for mobile apps

• Knowledge of mobile app testing frameworks and automation tools

• Experience with agile development methodologies and project management tools, version control systems, and collaborative development tools

• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills

Nice-to-have experience

• Experience building generative AI applications

• Basic backend development experience and experience with cloud services

• Game development experience: a track record of shipping 2D games on mobile platforms

• Experience writing high-performance, parallelized code

• Basic design skills: some experience using basic design tools to convey your ideas and make small asset adjustments (Figma, Photoshop, or an animation tool)

• Experience with product analytics from query to visualization

• Experience managing efficient real-time interfaces to ML pipelines & signal processing code

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

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

• Take initiative and full ownership of their work

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

• Exemplify integrity in their actions, decisions, and communication

• Want to build meaningful relationships at work

Here are some reasons to be a part of our team

• Immerse yourself in a collaborative environment surrounded by A+ engineers

• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI for education

• Experience the joy of turning your lines of code into engaging and educational experiences for children worldwide

• Work in tandem with our machine learning and platform teams, harnessing the full power of technology to reimagine education

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We’re currently around 45 people, headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in São Paulo, Brazil; Nairobi, Kenya; and New York.

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 are 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, 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 communities we work in; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture.

We feel enormously privileged to be one of the few companies that has the opportunity to take a shot at truly revolutionizing education with AI at this inflection point in technology. We don’t take it for granted, so we work quite hard to turn that vision into reality with urgency. 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 – and 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. If you need any accommodations throughout the interview process, please reach out to jackie@ello.com.