AI/ML Engineer

Ello • San Francisco, CA

18h • $155,000 - $205,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for an AI/ML Engineer to join our product engineering and applied research team. Our team operates at the intersection of research and production, solving open-ended problems while delivering real-world products. We use the best tool for the job, whether that’s a novel machine learning model or plain software engineering fundamentals.
You’re excited to build an AI product that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in education. You believe that great products and research strengthen each other. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy shipping AI features into a real product, designing the evaluations that prove they work, and turning fuzzy product questions into measurable experiments. You’ll make an edit in your Jupyter notebook this week, deploy it on-device next week, and watch it bring smiles to kids’ faces a day later.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience building AI products in an engineering or research role.
• You’ve worked in environments that require you to take a high level of ownership.
• You take pride in writing clean Python code that others can build upon.
• You’re able to get up-to-speed quickly on unfamiliar code, work well with other engineers of varying backgrounds, and debug complex systems.
• You can make technical decisions with incomplete information while still maintaining high engineering standards.
• You’ve built and operated evaluation or measurement systems, such as AI evals.
• You can own the loop from ambiguous product quality questions, to concrete metrics and research plans, back to production improvements.
• You’re comfortable with experimental thinking and reasoning through how to build systems around improving a non-deterministic product, while the underlying AI foundations shift.
• You can think empirically, but also make good calls in the gray area when needing to weigh conflicting signals and move quickly.
• You’re able to read recent ML papers and implement parts of the stack – you don’t need deep model training expertise, but you do need to understand how they work and how to evaluate them.
• You have sufficient proficiency in applied mathematics and linear algebra to contribute to research discussions.
• You have a working practice of leveraging AI in your engineering workflows, and an active curiosity in how AI is transforming work.

Nice To Haves

• Public projects that demonstrate technical creativity
• Strong product intuition — you can tell what's worth measuring and what isn't
• Depth in low-latency inference at scale
• Experience with model training
• Familiarity with speech systems

Responsibilities

• Help define the impact of AI on children’s education.
• Own AI systems and features end-to-end: from identifying product opportunities, to building and operating research and evaluation systems, to shipping production improvements used by children worldwide.
• Collaborate with learning experts and product engineers to build infrastructure measuring the educational quality, engagement, safety, latency, and behavior of an AI teacher
• Design and improve the agent harness that powers Ello’s tutoring experience, including how the tutor decides what to teach next, when to intervene, and how to adapt to each child
• Develop learner profiling and adaptation systems that build a model of each child – their strengths, gaps, pace, and engagement patterns – and use that model to drive instructional decisions
• Develop feedback loops and data flywheels that continuously improve product quality through usage, evaluation, and experimentation

Benefits

• We look for candidates who have something to teach us
• 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
• Want to build meaningful relationships at work
• If you already have work authorization in the US, we're open to sponsorship depending on your situation.
• We have successfully secured O-1 visas for Ello employees and retain top immigration counsel.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed