Head of Technology

About Esteam

At Esteam we are harnessing AI and ASR to build novel ways to assess and help children learn to read. Why? We are facing a literacy crisis. Over the past 20 years, the US literacy rates have remained stagnant with more than 65% of 4th grade children reading below proficiency levels. We aim to increase access and level the playing field for all children, whether we’re aiding in early learning, remediation or personalized acceleration – we believe literacy is a fundamental skill and right for all children.

Esteam is supported by the AI Fund based in Palo Alto, California. The AI Fund is a team of diligent innovators who build great companies that move humanity forward by accelerating the adoption of AI. Founded by Dr. Andrew Ng, AI Fund is a startup studio focused on resolving problems to move the world forward. We build new AI companies to bridge AI technology and critical applications. Just as electricity transformed numerous industries, AI and AI Fund are poised to do the same. 

Head of Technology

We are looking for a Head of Technology to lead the technical vision and build an AI and ASR based education platform. Beginning with literacy, you’ll work with the CEO to define and build a proprietary speech recognition engine uniquely tailored for kids to help assess and personalize their reading experience. We are stage zero so you’ll have the freedom to define the tech stack and build your dream team of experts across ASR and NLP technology, AI, full-stack eng, mobile and web.

What you will be doing:

• Leading the development of a proprietary, child-specific speech recognition technology which includes defining the technical requirements, planning for unique, competitive IP advantages, scoping and project planning
• We are an early-stage startup, so you must have the ability to write and review code, as well as define engineering structure, resources, operations and KPIs as we scale
• Manage security, compliance and data privacy policies, particularly ensuring COPPA complianceLeading an Agile startup environment balancing rapid iteration and prototyping, compliance, processes and long term architectural planning
• You will define the vision for the engineering organization and identify key hires. You will shape the engineering team across all platforms and be a thought leader in the field by applying AI to learning and the education space. As the company scales, you’ll mentor and develop a cross-functional team and instill structure as needed to ensure efficient product delivery
• Strategic planning with the CEO. You’ll begin with a 30/60/90 roadmap while helping to craft the technological vision, while pitching and fundraising to VCs

Must Haves:

• 8+ years experience with recent hands on development and managing a small technical team of engineers (eg ML, ASR, full-stack, mobile) as a Technical Lead
• A proven track record of early stage production AI development - defining a stage zero product and bringing it to market
• Experience working with and/or developing automatic speech recognition technology
• Experience architecting self-provisioning, scalable software platforms that are fully instrumented to provide real-time monitoring, automated incident notifications, and relevant historic and real-time user metrics
• Comfortable articulating complex technology solutions with a broad audience, from the technical team, VCs, product leaders, SMEs in the education space, teachers, and even kids!
• Scrappy and recent pre-seed or seed startup experience
• Positive outlook and a desire to build a company culture with humility, compassion and radical candor
• A Computer Science, Engineering or related technical degree

Nice To Haves:

• An interest in the edtech space and an authentic desire to change the learning outcomes of children or experience in the Edtech industry
• Experience building ASR systems using state-of-the-art technology (e.g., wav2vec2, NeMo)
• Experience developing B2C products
• Ability and experience attracting a solid technical team
• Previous early-stage startup experience or napkin sketch to product launch experience