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 roleWe're looking for Technical Ex-Founders to join our Engineering team. If you wrote your company's early code, operated it through real user growth, and miss building and shipping more than you miss anything else about the founder job, this role is for you.
Engineers who've founded or been the early technical leader at a startup tend to thrive at Slingshot because they get to work autonomously and own a large set of problems. They're product-minded owners by default, comfortable defining a problem, talking to users, building a solution, and iterating. We'll always have a place for smart and motivated technical people who have built and scaled something interesting.
Our tech stack uses Kotlin for core backend services, Python for our ML work, Dart/Flutter for the app, Next.js/TypeScript for internal tooling, 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.
What we look forYou founded or were the early technical lead at a startup, wrote a meaningful share of the production code yourself, and operated it through meaningful user growth.
6+ years of (recent) hands-on engineering experience, with opinions on trade-offs and quality formed by having to live with your own decisions in production.
Comfortable building inside AI/ML codebases. We don't need you to be an ML Engineer, but having an interest in AI helps!
If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you. A short note about what you built last, what you'd want to build next, and links to anything you've shipped (projects, repos, writing) is more useful to us than a polished CV.
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
Skills Required
- Founded or was the early technical lead at a startup
- 6+ years of hands-on engineering experience
- Experience with AI/ML codebases
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.
