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
This is a chance to join a passionate team leveraging cutting-edge AI to improve mental health access globally. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a critical role in building the systems and services that make the Ash product possible. You will work closely with our Software and ML teams to implement new features on the platform, ranging from UX improvements to bespoke ML model integration and orchestration work.
As a core member of a small but highly skilled team, we expect you to act as an owner and to care passionately about keeping our systems scalable, performant, and secure. Once you’re embedded in the team, you will get the opportunity to lead projects of your own, with goals to make our products better, faster, and more reliable.
Our tech stack uses Kotlin for core backend services, Python for our ML work, Dart/Flutter for our apps, as well as Rust for low level media streaming. We use gRPC and GCP (Kubernetes, Cloud Run) as our primary cloud provider. You’re not required to be an expert in all of these tools, but we would like you to come with a learning mindset and to not be afraid of getting your hands dirty with whatever tool the job might require.
About you:
Solid backend software development experience using a strongly typed / compiled languages. We use Kotlin, but we welcome backgrounds from Java, C#, Scala, Go, Rust.
Strong foundational understanding of scaling, reliability, observability and data security.
Involved in setting up CI, deployments, and hosting solutions from scratch.
Experience working in a fast paced environment, working at lightning speed to ship fast.
Self starter and a keen learner with an ability pick up new tools, languages, and concepts on the job. We don’t need you to be an Machine Learning Engineer, but having an interest in AI helps!
Key responsibilities:
In close collaboration with our Product, Core Engineering, and ML teams, build new core features and tooling to make Ash an even better product.
Design and implement new service contracts for communication with our app and other tools. We like gRPC!
Drive integration and ML inference efforts to leverage AI SaaS solutions and self hosted ML models reliably in production.
Keep out platforms running smoothly at scale. We’re expecting rapid growth and need to get our systems ready for a significant increase in demand.
While backend will be your primary focus, we encourage everyone to be comfortable working in all parts of our stack, which includes the app (Dart/Flutter), internal tooling (Next.js/TypeScript), and ML scripts for evaluation, data processing, and model training (Python).
What we offer:
A chance to join a passionate tight-knit team working on something to change the world
Competitive compensation (we target 90th percentile)
Travel between our NYC / London offices
Usual startup perks like free lunch in our offices + generous learning budget
Generous budget to 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.
