Kenya Growth Lead

You'll work closely with our growth and product teams in San Francisco, and collaborate with the rest of our Kenya team to keep growth grounded in what Kenyan families actually need. Because the teams work across time zones, this role requires real independence — you'll need to communicate decisions and results clearly, use data to support your recommendations, and move experiments forward with a high degree of autonomy.

What You'll Do

• Own and evolve Ello's growth strategy in Kenya, building on what's already working
• Set growth priorities and measurable targets; build a regular reporting cadence across the funnel, from awareness and acquisition through engagement and retention
• Lead content creation and organic social: source and manage local creators and influencers whose creative consistently powers our best-performing campaigns
• Identify and test new channels for building awareness and trust with Kenyan families
• Build strategic partnerships that unlock new audiences — think discounted mobile data with telcos, device access programs, and government relationships
• Manage our local agency and contractor relationships, and grow that bench as we scale
• Collaborate closely with the rest of our Kenya team to keep growth grounded in real user insight and data
• Help shape the growth playbook Ello will use as we expand to new markets

Key Requirements

• 5–7 years of experience in growth, marketing, or strategy roles
• Strongly analytical and data-driven: you own your metrics, know them cold, and catch when they're wrong
• Experience with or exposure to digital marketing, particularly ad campaigns across Meta and TikTok
• Real fluency in social and content: you're genuinely active on social platforms, have sharp opinions about what works, and have managed creators or influencers
• Entrepreneurial generalist: you're at your best when the strategy is yours to define and the walls are yours to run through
• An AI-forward way of working: you actively use AI tools to move faster and do better work, and can show it
• A proactive, structured communicator who thrives working across time zones and continents
• Based in Nairobi, or willing to relocate

Nice to Have

• Experience building and leading digital marketing campaigns. A track record of impressive digital marketing results — you can point to specific campaigns, channels, and numbers
• Partnerships or business development experience — the sales-adjacent skill of opening doors and closing deals
• Founder or early-stage startup experience
• Experience marketing to parents and families, or in consumer apps or education in Kenya and East Africa

We look for candidates who

• Run through walls — when the obvious path is blocked, you find or make another one
• Feel deep empathy for users and treat being their voice as a responsibility, not a slogan
• Bring an experimental mindset: test, measure, learn, repeat
• Communicate proactively and generously, especially when working independently
• Care deeply about our mission of maximizing the potential of every child

Reasons to join us

• Own Ello's growth in an entire country — and help shape how we grow in new markets
• Bring a free, world-class AI teacher to hundreds of thousands of Kenyan children — this is democratizing education in the most concrete way possible
• Dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of AI and interactive learning
• Do meaningful work supporting child development
• Be part of a growing but tight-knit team, with a second home in our Nairobi office

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.

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.

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