Head of Customer Experience

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Ello, a mission-driven edtech startup, seeks an experienced leader to own the full loop of family feedback and translate it into sprint-ready product insights. You will run research operations, support workflows, and a cross-continental team from Nairobi to San Francisco.

This role blends program design, data synthesis, and hands-on AI applications to improve learning experiences for children globally. You will report to the Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer, collaborate with the product

Qualifications

• Built and run an operational process that kept working after you stepped away.
• Spent extensive time with actual customers, especially families or parents.
• Turned messy qualitative and quantitative input into a decision that changed a team's build.
• Managed people remotely and across cultures with clear feedback.
• Use AI hands-on in work and can demonstrate a project.
• Strong writing skills for others to act on.
• Comfortable working with children and parents, even when the child ignores the script.

Responsibilities

• Own how Ello learns from families: US and Kenya surveys, parent research calls, session reviews, playtests, and synthesis to product.
• Build a repeatable system with clear owners, cadences, tooling, and AI-assisted automation.
• Run rituals keeping the company aligned with users: weekly session reviews, listening parties, and real-time moments in all-hands.
• Own customer support in multiple markets and turn it into insight rather than a queue to clear.
• Design and run the early-access parent program: collect feedback and act on it.
• Manage the Nairobi-based user research and operations team and collaborate with the Kenya Growth Lead and Rwanda partners.
• Partner with safety team so product insights reach the builders and support remains a first-line safety channel.
• Grow a small AI-native team as workload increases.

Skills

Operational leadership

Research ops

Customer interviews

People management

AI in work

Writing

Cross-cultural collaboration

Tools

Intercom

Survey tools

Product analytics

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 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 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. 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

Every day, families tell us what's working and what isn't. A parent writes in because the stories are too easy for her daughter. A six-year-old in a playtest ignores the character and asks for a dinosaur. A survey comes back from Nairobi with a pattern we didn't expect. A support conversation quietly reveals that our speech recognition is missing a whole group of kids. Right now, that signal lives in nine different tools and reaches the product team because a few people carry it there by hand.

We're hiring someone to own that whole loop. You'll build and run the system that takes everything families tell us, through support, surveys, parent calls, session reviews, playtests, and our safety team, and turns it into a clear, prioritized read that changes what we build. And you'll own the other direction too: when a family tells us something and we act on it, they hear back.

This is not a support lead role, and it's not a research role that ends with a report. Support is one of the richest inputs we have, and you'll own it. Research is a big part of the week, and you'll run it. But the job is the machine in between: making sure what families tell us actually lands in sprint planning, on a rhythm, without heroics.

You'll report to our co-founder and Chief Experience Officer, Dr. Elizabeth Adams, who owns how Ello listens to families at the exec level, and you'll work as closely with our product team as with anyone in the company. You'll manage a small team in Nairobi from day one, work alongside our Kenya Growth Lead, and help us learn how to understand families in Rwanda as we roll out there.

What You'll Do

• Own how Ello learns from families: the survey program in the US and Kenya, parent research calls, session reviews, in-office and remote playtests with kids, and the bi-weekly synthesis that goes to product

• Build the system that makes all of that repeatable through launch and beyond: clear owners, cadences, tooling, and automation, with AI doing as much of the heavy lifting as it responsibly can

• Run the rituals that keep the whole company close to users: the weekly session review pool, listening parties in San Francisco and Nairobi, and real parent and kid moments in every all-hands

• Own customer support in both markets over time, and make it a source of insight rather than a queue to clear

• Design and run our early-access parent program: the families who get new features first, tell us what they think, and hear back when we act on it

• Manage our user research and operations team in Nairobi, and work with our Kenya Growth Lead and Rwanda partners to understand families in each market on their own terms

• Partner with our safety team so that support is a reliable first line on safety-adjacent issues, and so the product insight our safety reviewers see every day reaches the people building the product

• Grow a small, AI-native team as the work outgrows the people we have

Key Requirements

• You've built and run an operational process that kept working after you stepped away: research ops, support ops, a customer program with a real cadence. You can tell us what it did and what broke.

• You've spent a lot of time with actual customers, ideally parents or families, and it shows in how you talk about them. Interviews, support, research, community. Not just the reports.

• You've turned messy qualitative and quantitative input into a decision someone else made. You can point to a time your synthesis changed what a team built.

• You've managed people, including remotely and across cultures. You give clear feedback and can break a vague question into work someone can run on their own from another time zone.

• You use AI seriously in your own work, hands-on rather than overseeing others, and can show us something you've built with it and what it got wrong.

• You write well. Most of this job is writing things other people will act on.

• You're comfortable in a room with a five-year-old and their parent, and you don't get thrown when the kid ignores the script.

Nice to Have

• Background in child development, education, or edtech, or consumer products where the person paying isn't the person using it

• Experience in emerging markets, especially East Africa, or on a team split across continents

• Experience with support tooling (Intercom or similar), survey and research tools, and product analytics

• You've stood up a community, ambassador, or early-access program

• Exposure to trust and safety or child safety operations

We look for candidates who

• Notice the person on the other end. A ticket is a parent telling us something about whether their kid is learning, and you hear it that way.

• Say "I don't know yet" when that's the honest answer, and then go find out with the right method.