Tech Lead, Ello

• You will be successful in this role if you have a strong foundational understanding of AI models but ultimately care deeply about turning research outputs into magical real-world product experiences
• Most importantly, you are excited about the opportunity to make a real impact on child development at scale
• You should have foundational knowledge in ML
• 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
• 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

Desirable

• As the Tech Lead on the ML team, you will work closely with the Co-Founder & CTO to lead the architecture design for all our ML and GenAI efforts
• Your role will bridge AI application development with third-party models and internal ML development leveraging our proprietary models and data
• You will oversee MLops in collaboration with our Platform team and set good standards for your colleagues on critical design questions around dataset management, experiment tracking, and distributed training infrastructure
• You will also get into the weeds as an IC and implement state-of-the-art machine learning systems
• You will lead the charge on bringing best practices to our AI-first product development process
• You’ll scale our evaluation infrastructure for applications spanning complex use cases – reading instruction, story generation, and interactive dialogue-based teaching
• You’ll design clean programming interfaces and build an internal SDK for our product engineering team
• 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
• Help lead a small but rapidly growing team of A+ engineers in a well-funded company
• Work at the cutting edge of interactive learning and artificial intelligence
• Stay plugged in with the research community while building real-world products
• Do meaningful work supporting child development that you can witness firsthand during in-office playtests. Make an edit in your jupyter notebook this week, deploy it on-device in C++ next week, and watch it bring smiles to kids’ faces a day later