Senior Unity Engineer (Contract)

Full-time contract (6+ months)

São Paulo, Brazil (hybrid)

Compensation range: $4-8k/mo depending on seniority

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, 40-person startup focused on revolutionizing the way children learn and interact with technology. At the intersection of gaming and education, our dedicated Unity team of 4 is pushing the boundaries of interactive learning experiences. By joining us, you'll be a critical part of a team that is not only building innovative products but also making a significant impact on child development. Our team lead works in our Vila Olimpia office 3 days/week, so this is a hybrid role with a strong preference for in-person collaboration. 

About the role

As a Senior Unity contractor at Ello, your role will revolve around developing, optimizing, and deploying interactive applications in Unity in order to bring Ello to life. Tasked with creating captivating experiences for young readers, you’ll not only be building upon a groundbreaking suite of learning tools but also forging a meaningful emotional connection with each child. We are looking for an individual contributor with strong experience in Unity, mobile development, and a willingness to dive deeper on the systems stack for ML collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy interactive applications in Unity.

• Optimize Unity applications for performance, reliability, and scalability.

• Collaborate with the ML, design, animation, and platform teams to ensure a cohesive product experience.

• Debug complex issues in Unity applications using profiling tools and other utilities.

• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of Unity's features, best practices, and the broader game development landscape.

• Lead by example, fostering a culture of excellence in coding, architecture, and product development.

Required Experience

• Proficient in C# programming and familiar with Unity-specific optimizations.

• Deep understanding of Unity's core features and APIs.

• Hands-on experience with UGUI and other Unity UI components.

• Demonstrated experience in optimizing Unity applications for performance

• Knowledge of Unity's project architecture, asset management, and other advanced features.

• Familiarity with Unity's debugging tools and build packaging and CI systems.

• Experience deploying Unity applications on iOS or Android.

• Comfortable with version control systems like Git and collaboration tools like Linear and Notion

• Mobile development experience and familiarity with Objective C++/ Swift for iOS,  Java/Kotlin/JNI/ C++ for Android

Nice to have experience

• Experience working in other native or cross-platform mobile frameworks (e.g. native iOS/Android, Flutter, etc.)

• Familiarity with IL2CPP, BURST, and DOTS.

• Experience in web development fundamentals.

• Understanding of mobile OS-level features and their limitations.

• Knowledge of the software lifecycle from code to executable on target systems.

• Experience with mobile operating systems architecture, including process lifecycle, memory management, and threading on Android and iOS.

• Proficiency in native platform integration using JNI (Android) and Objective-C/Swift (iOS) for advanced system interactions.

• Familiarity with mobile file systems, networking stacks, and background services.

• Knowledge of multithreading, async programming, and performance-efficient rendering techniques on mobile hardware.

• Experience with build systems like cmake, maven, makefiles, bazel or gradle to be able to collaborate closely with our ML team.

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 highly collaborative and fast-paced environment surrounded by A+ engineers.

• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of Unity development and interactive learning.

• 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 40 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.