Head of Design

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. We’re building the world’s first AI teacher to close that gap: 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 for all children. Our new app combines language, speech, and memory to deliver interactive learning for kids worldwide -– check it out here. We’re moving fast: we ship weekly, test directly with kids, and push the boundaries of what AI can do 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: to democratize education.

About the role

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.

Note: this role is scoped at the Director level, but we're open to hiring anywhere from Senior Manager to Senior Director — the title and scope will reflect the experience and leadership background you bring. If your experience doesn't match perfectly, we still encourage you to apply.

Responsibilities

Company-Wide Creative Direction & Design Culture

• 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

Design Leadership across Product and Marketing

• 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.

Creative Operations & Production Strategy

• Set the strategic direction for how creative production is structured — including how AI tools are embedded into illustration, animation, and asset workflows — and ensure the pipeline runs smoothly, scales efficiently, and reflects our design standards

• Maintain visibility across creative timelines and flag risks before they become blockers, serving as the connective tissue between design, engineering, product, and marketing

• Provide oversight on briefs, scopes of work, and delivery standards for contract teammates and vendors, ensuring quality and consistency across all production output

Required Experience

• 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

About Ello

Ello is a public benefit corporation on a mission to maximize the potential of all children. We’re currently around 45 people, headquartered in San Francisco with another 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 is representative of the communities we work in; we place significant emphasis on ensuring 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 one of the few companies that has the opportunity to take a shot at truly revolutionizing education with AI at this inflection point in technology. We don’t take it for granted, so we work quite hard to turn that vision into reality with urgency. 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.

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.