Creative Strategy Lead

Job description

Our mission at Ello is simple and urgent: maximize the potential of every child, everywhere. The best human educators listen, adapt, and inspire. Most kids never get one. We're building the world's first AI teacher to close that gap. 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're moving fast: 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: to democratize education. ABOUT THE ROLE This is a role for someone who wants to build things and put them out in the world, not just execute someone else’s plan. You’ll originate ideas, shape the strongest ones into something real, and see them through to a live test with customers. Few early-stage marketing roles offer this much ownership across the full arc. Our growth team is small, and deliberately so. We stay lean and move fast: we work with external agencies for volume, run in-house creative for the ideas only insiders can have, and take big swings knowing that one video that lands can outperform the thirty that don’t. At its core, this is high-velocity creative work: turning ideas into a steady stream of video and social creative, getting it in front of real users, and doubling down on what works. We want creative that stops the scroll and could only have come from Ello. We also want you to explore unconventional territory: guerrilla campaigns, new channels, ways of putting Ello in front of parents that no one has tried. That instinct - turning a creative idea into something real and tested - is the entrepreneurial streak we’re hiring for. You won’t be the only source of ideas. They’ll come from our in-house creators, our agencies, and the whole team. We expect you to have the taste to spot the strong ones wherever they come from and the drive to carry them through to results. You’ll also own the operating rhythm that keeps creative shipping quickly: writing briefs, guiding feedback, working with agencies, and building the external creative bench as we scale. It’s a rare mix; plenty of people can dream up ideas but stall before anything ships, and plenty can run a tight process but never have the idea in the first place. We’re hiring for both. You’ll touch every part of a modern growth engine—paid and organic social, product-led growth, brand, and creative campaigns, at the stage where one person can still have a hand in all of it. You’ll work closely with our Growth Marketing Lead and report to our General Manager, who has built and scaled a consumer brand before and will coach you directly. We’re hiring for trajectory: this is a natural fit for someone ready to stretch, with a real path to running a team of their own. The opportunity is bigger than making ads. You’ll help define how parents understand and trust an entirely new category of AI, and help a product that could change how children learn reach the families who need it. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Come up with the creative bets worth making, grounded in a sharp read of our audience: parents who want the best for their kids. Bring the ideas and, just as importantly, the taste to judge which are worth backing and why. - Take those bets all the way through: shape them into briefs, get them produced, put them live across paid and organic social, and read the results honestly to decide what to scale and what to cut. - Produce a high volume of creative for testing, using AI tools to move faster and try more than a team our size normally could. - Take on bigger creative projects and run them end to end, whether that’s a guerrilla marketing campaign or turning one of our founders into the public face of AI in education. Sometimes the idea will be yours; sometimes we’ll hand you the goal. Either way, you’ll shape the creative and carry it through to something real. - Run the creative pipeline: establish the weekly rhythm across in-house creators, designers, and agencies; find, vet, and manage the external creators, contractors, and specialist partners that keep creative volume scaling. - Turn what’s working into sharper positioning, feeding the signals from live creative back into how we message and talk about the brand. - Turn what we ship into what the market hears: work hand in hand with the product and AI teams so each new feature reaches parents as a story they feel, not a spec they skim. Since we ship weekly, you’re the bridge between what the product can newly do and how the world finds out. KEY REQUIREMENTS - 4–7 years of full-time experience across a marketing, creative, agency, or founder/operator background — or a non-marketing path with clear evidence of trajectory - Evidence you've taken something from idea to shipped reality - ideally something you started yourself and drove to a real outcome, not just contributed to - Real, demonstrable taste for short-form social: you can point to a specific hook, ad, or piece of content and explain why it works (or doesn't) - Structured communicator: ask “how would you approach X” and you give a clear, honest framework, including what you'd want to know before deciding - Comfortable sourcing, briefing, and managing external contractors, freelancers, or agencies - Actively use AI tools in your own creative or research workflow today - not occasionally - and can point to something specific it's changed about how you work NICE TO HAVE - Hands-on production skill: writing, light design, or video editing - Experience running an operating cadence - sprints, production calendars, or agency management - Exposure to consumer, parenting, or education-adjacent audiences - Experience pressure-testing messaging or positioning, not just executing against a brief WE LOOK FOR CANDIDATES WHO - Have real user empathy: they can put themselves in the head of a worried parent at 9pm, and it shows in their creative instincts - Bring a spark of originality - the kind of insight that takes what's working and pushes the brand somewhere it wouldn't have gone on its own - Organize people well: sprints run on time, feedback gets to the right person, nothing falls through the cracks — and people like working with them while it happens - Hold a point of view and argue for it, and genuinely update when someone shows them something better - Are on a steeper trajectory than their years suggest — we're hiring for trajectory, not tenure REASONS TO JOIN US - Lead real creative bets from day one, with the scope to invent and ship them yourself and a clear and a steep growth trajectory if you're successful. - See every part of a modern growth engine (- paid and organic social, product-led growth, agencies, brand, and creative) - at the stage where one person can still touch all of it which is how you become someone who can run all of it. - Get coached directly by a General Manager, someone who has built and scaled a consumer brand before.with real scope from day one, and a clear path to managing our in-house creative pipeline and the creator network you build - Help define how families come to trust an entirely new category of AI, and get a product that can change how children learn into the hands of the kids who need itWork on a product parents genuinely love, at a mission-driven company that's growing fast 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 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 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.