Tech Lead, GenAI & Machine Learning

About the position

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.

Responsibilities

• Oversee the development and deployment of machine learning models to production environments
• Lead by example, fostering a culture of excellence in architecture, coding, and model development
• Provide guidance, regular feedback, education, and mentoring to other members of the ML team
• Monitor and maintain deployed models and data pipelines
• Independently lead research work streams as part of Ello’s ML team
• Lead collaboration with platform and frontend engineers as well as TPM and data team on data collection, pipeline design, model training, and deployment
• Continuously learn and stay up to date with the latest advancements in AI and machine learning engineering

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as an ML engineer/researcher working with modern Machine Learning toolkits (Python stack, very comfortable with PyTorch)
• 2+ years of experience with GenAI product development (pipeline design, serving, prompt management, fine-tuning, evaluation, etc.), with some evidence shipping real world products using the most recent tools
• 3+ years of experience building, scaling, and optimizing ML systems
• Experience setting up ML ops workflows and infrastructure from scratch in a startup environment (ideally in Terraform on AWS)
• Production programming experience on a data-intensive project in distributed infrastructure
• Experience deploying distributed data and training pipelines on Kubernetes
• Experience with large language models
• Experience writing high-performance, parallelized code
• Applied mathematics and linear algebra proficiency at the level at which you can contribute to research discussions with a deeply technical team
• Very accustomed to agile software engineering processes, git flow, etc.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with voice AI stacks and audio pipeline development
• Prior experience setting up GPU clusters (e.g. previously set up SLURM, or built multi-cloud model training pipelines with Infrastructure-as-Code)
• Some familiarity with basic full-stack web development workflows and frontend API interaction
• 2+ years of experience leading teams developing ML solutions
• On-device systems experience
• An understanding of low-level build pipelines and deployment experience in C/C++ or similar
• Experience working with mobile operating systems and I/O pipelines in resource-constrained environments
• Experience with optimizing neural networks to perform well on low-power mobile platforms (e.g. pruning, distillation, quantization)
• Signal processing background

Benefits

• Competitive salary range of $165,000 - $220,000 + Equity
• Opportunity to work at the cutting edge of interactive learning and artificial intelligence
• Support for immigration processes including visa sponsorship
• Collaborative and inclusive work environment
• Meaningful work supporting child development