Associate Member of Technical Staff, Platform Team
TLDR
Early-career engineers build tooling to enable a psychology-focused foundation model, shipping to real users from day one in an AI-native team.
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
We're looking for early-career engineers who are exceptional builders. You're a year or two into your first job, and you have evidence already that you're brilliant, that you build, and that you're on a fast growth trajectory.
As a member of our platform team, you'll build tooling that enables our internal team and our collaborators to build our foundation model for psychology, and build Slingshot as an AI-native company. You'll learn fast and build constantly. Examples of things you may work on include our "devboxes" that enable people less familiar with the codebase (like designers) to ship for themselves; enabling our trust and safety team; working closely with our leadership team to build systems that manage the company.
The Slingshot team consists entirely of experienced engineers, so you'll be joining as one of a few select early-career engineers. You'll thrive at Slingshot when you show up hungry, take ownership from day one, and treat every problem as yours to solve. You'll ship to real users in your first weeks, and grow faster here than you would anywhere else. We'll give you scope as fast as you can take it.
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 any of these, and we'd 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 for
We index on evidence of intelligence and builder energy. That looks like:
You've won (or placed well at) hackathons.
You've launched products that real people used, whether side projects, open-source tools, or something you sold.
You have high test scores, competition results, or another clear signal of raw ability.
You write code because you can't help it, and you have the repos, demos, and shipped work to prove it.
Our team typically works long hours — expect to be in the office most days (we have a beautiful office and all eat lunch together) and to put in well beyond a standard week
Don't have the evidence yet? Build something.
If you don't have a project to point to, that's fine: show us instead. Build something, record a short demo video, and send us a link to the repo. That will tell us more than your CV ever could.
Not sure what to build? Here are some ideas where we'd love to see an open-source app:
An open-source Loom (screen + camera recording and easy sharing)
An open-source Granola (AI meeting notes)
A receipt and expense scanner
A QR code generator
A Slackmoji generator powered by AI
Background removal from images
A PDF toolkit: merge, split, compress, rotate, and sign
An expense splitter like Splitwise
An AI teleprompter for calls that guides you on what to say, like Cluely
... anything that involves learning something new and building something valuable
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
Benefits
Free Meals & Snacks
free lunch and coffee in office
Learning Budget
generous learning budget
Remote-Friendly
Travel between our NYC / London offices
Wellness Stipend
We cover your personal therapy
Slingshot AI is developing Ash, the first AI specifically designed to enhance mental health care. By leveraging advanced technology, we aim to make mental health support more accessible and empower individuals to transform their lives according to their own aspirations.