---
title: 'Lead Growth Engineer at Ello'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/lead-growth-engineer-ello-san-francisco-xb316wj53mf9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-19'
---

# Lead Growth Engineer at Ello

- **Company:** Ello
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-30
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-19
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ello/60464edf-a471-47f7-9465-d2433037154d

## Job description

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. We’re building the world’s first AI teacher—one that listens, speaks, adapts, and inspires, just like the best human educators.

Our first product, Read with Ello, is already helping tens of thousands of kids each week learn to read. It listens as they read aloud, offers support when they stumble, and generates magical, personalized stories. It works, and kids love it.

Now we’re scaling that success into something even bigger: a complete AI teacher that can help children learn far beyond reading. Our new app combines language, speech, and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide; check it out[here](https://www.ello.com/). We ship weekly, test directly with kids, and push the boundaries of what’s possible with AI in education.

With the resources of the world’s top investors and the heart of a public benefit corporation, we’re here to revolutionize how children learn globally. Featured on TIME’s Best Inventions and Fortune’s Change the World, Ello is a small, mission-driven team taking on one of the most important challenges of our time: democratizing education.

## About the role

Ello is entering a new stage of growth, and we’re hiring our first dedicated Growth Engineer to help define and lead how growth engineering works here.

You’ll collaborate closely with PMs and key stakeholders to ideate, develop and bring ideas to life. You’ll own the full learning loop that drives features into real business outcomes. Your work spans customer facing product surfaces that carry into the data, experimentation, and operational systems behind them.

This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to help build a function, not simply join one. You might be an exceptional product-minded generalist with a high ceiling, or an experienced growth engineer who brings a craft we do not yet have. We care more about judgment, creativity, agency, and demonstrated impact than a specific number of years. We work in person from our San Francisco office and are big believers in face-to-face collaboration.

## What you’ll do

- Help build Ello’s growth-engineering strategy, operating model, tooling, and standards.
- Develop and own growth features end to end across mobile, web, backend, and lifecycle channels—from idea through launch and iteration.
- Identify high-leverage opportunities across acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, and referral.
- Design and run small, fast experiments; define success metrics; instrument the experience; and turn results into clear next steps.
- Improve critical journeys such as onboarding, signup, parent experiences, referrals, notifications, and other growth loops.
- Build or evolve experimentation, analytics, and data systems that increase the team’s velocity of learning.
- Connect quantitative signals with qualitative insight into children’s and parents’ motivations and behavior.
- Partner closely with product, design, engineering, marketing, and company leadership while independently driving work forward.
- Bring a distinctive strength to the team and help us raise the bar for growth engineering as the function develops.

## What we’re looking for

The strongest candidates will be excellent in at least two of the following areas and solid in the third:

- Engineering: You can independently ship high-quality, full-stack product work and build for rapid iteration.
- Growth and product judgment: You understand funnels, growth loops, user motivation, and how product or incentive changes affect behavior.
- Experimentation and data: You can define metrics, design and interpret experiments, and use data to make product decisions without waiting for a data scientist.
- Creativity & innovation: You bring new ideas to the table, derived from first principles of what resonates with our users and their needs.

You’ll also bring:

- A track record of shipping product or growth initiatives that produced measurable user or business impact.
- Strong ownership and a bias to action: you can create something from nothing, turn ambiguity into a plan, and follow through.
- Comfort working across the stack. Experience with Flutter, native iOS or Android, React, Python, or comparable technologies is useful; we care most about your ability to learn and deliver.
- Hands-on experience with analytics and experimentation tools, such as SQL, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, or equivalent systems.
- Strong product sense, including empathy for user motivations and an ability to connect data trends to underlying human behavior.
- A collaborative, direct communication style and the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, design, marketing, and business.
- The judgment to balance speed with quality and the confidence to ship partial solutions when that is the fastest way to learn.

## Nice to have

- Experience building beautiful & delightful products features or experiences for children and parents.
- Experience with consumer growth,sharing, subscriptions, lifecycle systems, or referral products.
- Experience integrating third-party systems such as Stripe, Twilio, SendGrid, or CRMs.
- Experience using AI tools to increase development velocity or working with AI products and evaluation pipelines.
- Experience setting the foundations for or have spun up new function, practice, or team.

We look for candidates who

- Want to build, experiment, and bring something new to the table.
- Have something to teach us and are eager to learn from an excellent team.
- Take initiative and full ownership of their work.
- Care deeply about craft while valuing the velocity of learning.
- Want to make a meaningful impact on child development at scale.
- Prefer open, direct communication grounded in empathy.
- Act with integrity and want to build meaningful relationships at work.

## Why join Ello

- Build a new growth-engineering function with unusual ownership and room to grow.
- Work at the frontier of AI and interactive learning.
- See your work reach thousands of families around the world, helping children engage with their learning journey. .
- Join an exceptional, mission-driven team with a culture of engineering excellence.

## About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We’re currently around 50 people, headquartered in San Francisco with a second office in Nairobi, Kenya.

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 are funded by world-class investors including Goodwater Capital, Homebrew, Reed Hastings, Common Sense Growth, Ravensburger, Project A Ventures, 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 represents the communities we work in; we place significant emphasis on diversity in our team and inclusion in our culture. If you have questions about immigration, reach out to us at recruiting@ello.com.

We feel enormously privileged to be building at this moment. Advances in AI have made it possible, for the first time, to imagine giving every child a truly personalized teacher. We don’t take that opportunity for granted.

We work with urgency because millions of children can’t wait. We care deeply about craftsmanship because learning experiences should feel magical. And we believe it’s possible to build ambitious technology while building a company where people do the best work of their careers.

If that excites you, we’d love to meet you.

At Ello, diversity is a moral imperative and a competitive advantage. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, skin color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We plan and structure our interviews to assess skills and experience directly. If you need accommodations throughout the interview process, please contact recruiting@ello.com.

## About Ello

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ello provides an AI-powered reading coach for children in kindergarten through third grade, using speech recognition and adaptive learning to improve literacy.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series unknown; raised $15M, Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Catalin Voss (CTO), Dr. Elizabeth Adams (CEO), Tom Sayer (CXO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Educational technology (EdTech) / AI-powered literacy
- **Target customers**: B2C – parents of early readers (K–3rd grade); also expanding into schools and international markets
- **Mission statement**: "To unlock the limitless potential within all children."

## Products & Services
- **Ello App (AI Reading Coach)**: A subscription-based mobile app that listens to children read aloud, provides real-time corrections, encouragement, and adaptive book recommendations. Uses proprietary Adaptive Learn™ technology and world-leading child speech recognition.
- **Decodable E-Books**: A library of exclusive, phonics-leveled e-books designed to match a child’s reading ability. A free public library of 700+ e-books is also available.
- **Adaptive Learn™ Engine**: The proprietary AI system that personalizes instruction based on each child’s performance and interests.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $15M (raised in September 2023, per TechCrunch)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2020 batch); lead investor(s) in the $15M round not specified in available sources
- **Growth Signals**: Team size of ~45 employees (as of YC profile); expanding internationally with a Product Manager role based in Nairobi, Kenya; recognized as a Public Benefit Corporation; cited as "world's first 1:1 AI teacher" and "world leading child speech recognition."

## Competitive Advantages
- **Proprietary AI engine (Adaptive Learn™)** that adapts to each child’s ability and interests in real time
- **World-leading child speech recognition** – built specifically for young voices and reading patterns
- **Science of Reading** – all content and coaching methods are grounded in decades of phonics and literacy research
- **Decodable books** – books are leveled to match the child’s phonics stage, unlike most children’s e-books
- **Evidence-based instruction** – co-founded by a clinical psychologist specializing in child development

## Strategic Focus
- **Global expansion** – establishing a presence in Nairobi, Kenya (job posting for Product Manager)
- **Deepening AI capabilities** – improving the 1:1 AI teacher experience and expanding the Adaptive Learn™ system
- **Scaling content library** – adding more decodable e-books and supporting pre-readers and higher grade levels
- **Building the team** – actively hiring for AI/ML, design, and product roles to support growth

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven**: Everyone at Ello is dedicated to solving one of the most important issues – ensuring all children learn to read, with a strong sense of purpose.
- **Culture of Care**: Small, tight-knit team that values honesty, empathy, and diversity; team members are encouraged to bring their whole selves to work.
- **Impact & Delight**: Work combines urgent social impact with making learning fun for children.
- **Work policy**: Hybrid/office presence in San Francisco and Nairobi; roles are listed with location requirements (e.g., Product Manager in Nairobi, AI/ML Engineer in SF).
- **Notable perks**: Not explicitly listed, but the company is a Public Benefit Corporation, and the engineering culture emphasizes AI/ML innovation and real-world impact.

## Sources
1. [ello.com](https://www.ello.com/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ello)
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ello)
4. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/07/ai-reading-coach-startup-ello-raises-15m/)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/elloinc)

## Other roles at Ello

- [Product Lead, Monetization](https://feeny.ai/job/product-lead-monetization-ello-san-francisco-fwc8dk33y8f1) — San Francisco, CA
- [AI/ML Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/ai-ml-engineer-ello-san-francisco-a57d125hq59c) — San Francisco, CA
- [General / Opportunistic Application](https://feeny.ai/job/general-opportunistic-application-ello-san-francisco-dxz9m8h18kvy) — San Francisco, CA