Head of Design (2026)

Ello • San Francisco, CA

4d • $200,000 - $260,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We’re looking for a Head of Design to lead Ello’s creative vision and scale our design practice across product, marketing, and content. You’ll shape how our AI teacher looks, feels, and behaves—guiding a growing team and ensuring design excellence at every level. With engineering velocity moving faster than ever, your role is critical: we need a design culture that not only keeps up with rapid iteration, but actively fuels it. You’ll help us build a design culture that can match the ambition of Ello’s vision for innovation and growth, raising the bar for product quality, design maturity, and cross-functional collaboration.
This is a high-impact, high-ownership role that blends creative vision, operational excellence, and people leadership. You will report directly to Ello’s Co-Founder & CTO, Catalin Voss, and collaborate closely with our other Co-Founders, CEO Tom Sayer and CXO Elizabeth Adams. In this role, you’ll serve as both a creative compass and a strategic leader—helping us imagine, define, and build magical learning experiences for kids around the world.
We’re looking for an experienced creative leader who thrives at the intersection of imagination and execution. You’ve shipped beautiful, high-impact products and built teams and AI-enabled systems and processes that made that possible. You’re excited about working in person in San Francisco. You’re hands-on when needed, and you see AI as critical leverage for your craft. Most of all, you care deeply about creating joyful, meaningful experiences for kids.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience in creative production, preferably across mobile apps, games, or interactive experiences
• Demonstrated ability to lead a team through multiple product cycles, from concept to delivery
• A practiced leader of visual storytelling with a strong portfolio in illustration, animation, and UI
• Comfortable managing and mentoring creative teams while being hands-on when needed
• Experienced in coordinating cross-functional teams, including artists, animators, PMs, engineers, and marketers
• Deeply organized and proactive with excellent project management skills
• Exceptional written and visual communicator with high emotional intelligence and collaborative energy
• Expertise with tools like Figma, Linear, Notion, and Drive, as well as genuine curiosity about and engagement with AI design tools

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing for kids, families, or in edtech, consumer apps, mobile gaming, publishing, or animation
• Prior success in building and scaling creative pipelines

Responsibilities

• Uphold, institutionalize, and elevate Ello’s creative direction and principles across product and marketing
• Maintain a high-quality visual bar and ensure consistency across illustration, animation, and interface design
• Lead team critiques and feedback loops to foster continuous improvement
• Build and strengthen Ello’s design culture, including training, upskilling, and mentoring team members outside the design team (e.g., engineering and marketing)
• Champion design excellence across the company and help instill design best practices cross-functionally
• Collaborate closely with Product and Engineering leadership to shape product direction and user experience
• Collaborate closely with Marketing leadership to shape our go-to-market and lifecycle marketing
• Champion a deep understanding of our users—their needs, motivations, and challenges—and ensure every experience we design is intuitive, purposeful, and grounded in real customer insight.
• Own creative timelines, milestone planning, and the art and asset production pipeline — building for scalability and embedding AI into every workflow
• Serve as the connective tissue between creative, engineering, product, and marketing — leading proactive communication, facilitating sprint planning and retros, and flagging risks before they become blockers
• Manage contract teammates and vendors; draft and oversee briefs, scopes of work, and delivery requirements

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

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