Senior Unity Engineer

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 a child read from real books. 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 children. We’re a highly technical team building delightful learner-centered experiences that leverage the most recent advances in AI. Our products put children on a path of lifelong learning, creating the foundation for their future and ours. Together, we believe we can close literacy and educational gaps around the world. 

Who you’ll be joining

Ello is a rapidly growing, series A startup focused on revolutionizing the way children learn and interact with technology. At the intersection of gaming and education, our dedicated Unity team of 5 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.

Where we want to hire

We're ideally looking for two full-time Unity engineers (senior or mid-level) who want to start our next in-person Ello office in Latin America, and we're open to any city with enough talent density to grow in (e.g., São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; Mexico City, Mexico).

About the role

As a Senior Unity Engineer at Ello, your role will revolve around developing, optimizing, and deploying interactive applications in Unity. Reporting directly to our Head of Engineering, you'll be front-line to bringing Ello to life. Tasked with building 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 Unity experience (and ideally mobile development experience as well).

Responsibilities

• Develop and deploy interactive applications in Unity.

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

• Collaborate as needed 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.

• Contribute to a culture of excellence in coding, architecture, and product development.

Required Experience

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

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

• Knowledge of Unity's project structure and asset management.

• Familiarity with Unity's debugging tools.

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

Nice to have experience

• Demonstrated experience in optimizing Unity applications for performance

• Experience deploying Unity applications on iOS or Android.

• Familiarity with IL2CPP, BURST, and DOTS.

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

• Familiarity/ experience in Objective C++/ Swift for iOS,  Java/ Kotlin/ JNI/ C++ for Android

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

• Experience in web development fundamentals.

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 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.

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 have recently closed a $15M Series A led by Goodwater Capital, with major participation from Homebrew (returning investors), Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, and Ravensburger. This adds to existing funding led by Project A Ventures with additional investors including 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 wider community; we place significant emphasis on ensuring diversity in our team and inclusion in our 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.

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, reach out to your recruiter.