Back to jobs
New

Senior Software Engineer, (Studio Engineer)

United States

Senior Software Engineer

Our client is building a new kind of learning experience for children.

Their first product is a learning companion for kids ages 5-10 that listens, talks, and teaches math and reading through stories built around what each child is curious about. Behind the experience is a learning graph that understands what a child already knows, what they are working on, and what should come next.

They are a small team building across AI, software, hardware, learning science, and storytelling. They are looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help turn ideas into working experiences at extraordinary speed.

The Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll sit at the intersection of engineering, AI tooling, and creative product development.

You'll build the systems that allow the team to go from an idea to a working, student-testable experience in days instead of weeks. You'll work closely with engineers, designers, curriculum experts, and storytellers to make prototyping faster, more collaborative, and easier to turn into production software.

This isn't a traditional feature-engineering role. You'll spend a lot of time building the tools and infrastructure that help the entire team build.

You'll experiment with new AI development workflows, create reusable scaffolding for prototypes, build generative asset pipelines, and develop systems that let agents work autonomously across projects. You'll also help bridge the gap between rapidly built prototypes and reliable production software.

What You'll Do

Build Autonomous AI Development Workflows

  • Build systems for long-running agent tasks that can execute asynchronously and overnight
  • Create runners, queues, and orchestration systems that allow agents to work across multiple repositories in parallel
  • Reduce the amount of manual prompting and supervision required to get engineering work done
  • Experiment with new agentic development workflows and integrate the ones that prove useful into the studio

Build Collaborative Agent Tooling

  • Move the team beyond isolated 1:1 AI sessions toward shared, collaborative agent workspaces
  • Connect agent workflows into tools like Slack and Linear so work is visible and accessible across the team
  • Build systems for triggering, monitoring, and coordinating agent work
  • Help establish a development environment where engineers, designers, and creative teams can work with AI together

Build Generative Creative Pipelines

  • Build multimodal AI pipelines for generating images, video, music, sound effects, stories, and other creative assets
  • Create tools and scaffolding that allow curriculum designers and creators to rapidly produce new activities and experiences
  • Turn emerging generative AI capabilities into practical tools the studio can actually use
  • Build reusable infrastructure rather than one-off demos

Turn Prototypes Into Production

  • Create SDKs and starter modules that make production capabilities easy to use in new prototypes
  • Package systems such as voice, animation, vision, and conversational AI into reusable building blocks
  • Keep rapidly built prototypes aligned with evolving core platform capabilities
  • Build automated workflows for refactoring, upgrading, and hardening prototype code
  • Establish shared technical standards and libraries that make it easier for successful experiments to graduate into production

Keep the Studio Moving

  • Own the tooling and engineering work that keeps creative and product teams unblocked
  • Provide responsive technical support when prototypes, experiments, or studio workflows hit a roadblock
  • Help protect the deep-work time of engineers focused on foundational systems
  • Identify recurring friction in the development process and build systems to eliminate it

What Success Looks Like

You'll help transform our client into a high-velocity, collaborative, AI-forward studio where creative ideas move quickly from concept to something a child can actually use.

In practice, that means:

  • New concepts go from idea to student-testable prototype in days instead of weeks
  • Individual assets and activity iterations happen in hours instead of days
  • Designers and creators can build against a standardized set of powerful engineering primitives
  • AI agents can execute meaningful work autonomously and in parallel, including overnight
  • The team can collaborate with agents through shared workflows rather than isolated chat sessions
  • Successful prototypes can be hardened and graduated into production without starting over

What We're Looking For

  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to build production-quality systems
  • Experience building developer tools, internal platforms, automation, infrastructure, or similar systems
  • Deep curiosity about AI coding agents and emerging agentic development workflows
  • Experience working with APIs, orchestration, queues, asynchronous systems, and automation
  • Comfort working across the stack and moving between infrastructure, product, and creative tooling
  • A strong prototyping instinct - you like building something quickly, testing it, and iterating
  • The ability to work autonomously in a small, highly collaborative team
  • Good judgment about when to prototype, when to build a reusable abstraction, and when to ship something simple
  • Interest in the intersection of AI, creativity, and learning

Bonus Points

  • Experience with generative AI pipelines across text, image, audio, or video
  • Experience building agentic systems or autonomous coding workflows
  • Experience with Slack, Linear, GitHub, or similar developer workflow integrations
  • Experience building SDKs, developer platforms, or internal tooling
  • Experience with voice, real-time interaction, animation, or multimodal systems
  • Experience working on products for children, education, games, or creative tools

Why Join Our Client

You'll join at an unusually early stage, when the engineering decisions and development culture are still being defined.

The team is building a product where AI, software, hardware, storytelling, and learning science all meet. The company describes itself as a small team building real hardware and putting the product in front of actual children every week.

You'll have a direct impact not only on what gets built, but how the entire team builds it.

The next ten people build the thing.

Apply for this job

*

indicates a required field

Resume/CV*

Accepted file types: pdf, doc, docx, txt, rtf

Select...
Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification

For government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

As set forth in elly’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

Select...
Select...
Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Select...

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Form CC-305
Page 1 of 1
OMB Control Number 1250-0005
Expires 07/31/2029

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor. The law requires us to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We have a goal of having at least 7% of our workers as people with disabilities. The law says we must measure our progress towards this goal. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had one. People can become disabled, so we need to ask this question at least every five years.

Completing this form is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer is confidential. No one who makes hiring decisions will see it. Your decision to complete the form and your answer will not harm you in any way. If you want to learn more about the law or this form, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

A disability is a condition that substantially limits one or more of your “major life activities.” If you have or have ever had such a condition, you are a person with a disability. Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Alcohol or other substance use disorder (not currently using drugs illegally)
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer (past or present)
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or serious difficulty hearing
  • Diabetes
  • Disfigurement, for example, disfigurement caused by burns, wounds, accidents, or congenital disorders
  • Epilepsy or other seizure disorder
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual or developmental disability
  • Mental health conditions, for example, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Mobility impairment, benefiting from the use of a wheelchair, scooter, walker, leg brace(s) and/or other supports
  • Nervous system condition, for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Neurodivergence, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, dyspraxia, other learning disabilities
  • Partial or complete paralysis (any cause)
  • Pulmonary or respiratory conditions, for example, tuberculosis, asthma, emphysema
  • Short stature (dwarfism)
  • Traumatic brain injury
Select...

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.