Slingshot AI
Slingshot AI is the team behind Ash, the first AI designed for mental health. Our mission is to make support more accessible and help people change their lives in the ways they want.
We’re building a world-class team by empowering individuals with the autonomy, flexibility, and support they need to do their best work. We dream big, iterate fast, and care deeply. If that sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.
Our team spans machine learning, product, engineering, conversational design, clinical, growth, and operations, with offices in both New York City and London.
We're a well-funded Series A company, having raised $93M from Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, plus top-tier tech investors involved in ElevenLabs, Captions, Shopify, Plaid, Notion, Canva, Twitch, Airtable, and many others.
The role
As an Engineering Manager at Slingshot, you will lead a product-focused engineering squad responsible for building and evolving Ash. You’ll work within a cross-functional product team that includes Product, Design, and Engineering, partnering with our Product Manager, Kieran Davies, to explore ideas, set direction, and turn ambiguity into momentum.
We’re looking for someone who wants to be a manager, is deeply respected by engineers, and brings humility to leading a team of experts, someone who enables great work rather than dictating it. You will spend your time thinking strategically about what to build next and how to get there, while also contributing hands-on to our app, prototypes, and infrastructure. You’ll thrive in this role if you enjoy balancing leadership with building, prefer to lead with context over control, coding and experimentation over process or documentation, and enormously value having a high-performance, tight knit team.
As the manager, you will support your team by creating clarity, encouraging healthy debate, and helping engineers adapt quickly to changing priorities. Rather than shielding the team from change, you’ll act as a facilitator, treating “we were wrong last week” as a sign of progress and an opportunity to improve.
About you:
Extroverted facilitator who thrives in a team of engineers, helping everyone communicate and collaborate effectively.
Hands-on engineer who enjoys building user-facing systems, prototypes, and infrastructure, prioritising impact over architecture perfection.
Creative and product-minded, capable of generating ideas collaboratively to explore new directions.
Humble leader comfortable managing experts, giving them trust, and holding them to a high bar.
Agile and adaptable, enjoys embracing ambiguity and frequent changes in priorities while guiding the team with clarity and focus.
Key responsibilities:
Work closely with our founders every day to understand and shape priorities, and ensure strategic transparency and clarity with the engineering team
Lead, mentor, and support engineers, balancing hands-on contribution with people management.
Collaborate with designers and product to define priorities, brainstorm, and translate product ideas into working user-facing products.
Build a high performance team that keeps our product reliable and scalable, without sacrificing rapid iteration.
Lead with context: facilitate team communication, clarity, and alignment during transitions, helping engineers express ideas and make decisions confidently.
What we offer:
A chance to join a passionate tight-knit team working on something to change the world
Competitive compensation (top of personal market)
Travel between our NYC / London offices
Usual startup perks like free lunch and coffee in office + generous learning budget
We cover your personal therapy
Top Skills
What We Do
About Us
We're a team of machine learning and product engineers training task-specific generative models for psychology. Our mission is to use AI to make mental healthcare more accessible and to help people change their lives in the ways they want. We partner with organizations around the globe and power use cases, including AI-assisted crisis text response and AI counseling, while securing best-in-class datasets to power our models.
Success to us means every human being in need of support having somewhere to go. We're a well-funded, seed-stage startup backed by top-tier tech investors involved in ElevenLabs, Captions, Shopify, Plaid, Notion, Canva, Twitch, Airtable, and others.
We're building a powerful team by empowering our engineers with the autonomy, flexibility, and resources to do their best work. We dream big and iterate fast. If that sounds like home, we'd love to hear from you.
