Senior Software Engineer, (Studio Engineer) at Elly in United States

Job description

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• 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
• 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

Skills

Required

• Software engineering fundamentals
• Building production-quality systems
• Full-stack development
• Prototyping
• Autonomous work
• Collaboration
• Judgment
• Interest in AI, creativity, and learning

Preferred

• Slack, Linear, GitHub integrations