Technical Ex-Founder at Slingshot AI (London, United Kingdom)
Slingshot AI· London, United Kingdom· £100k–£250k·
Role details
Job description
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 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 FOR
- You 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
Why work at Slingshot AI
- Mission-driven work: "Every action we take helps a real person, in the real world." The company is deeply focused on making a tangible impact on mental health.
- Culture: Values include "celebrate divergence and value authenticity," "move fast and embrace the unknown," "treat each other like adults," and "always in search of truth." Emphasis on autonomy, ownership, and fast iteration.
- Work model: In-office (employees work from physical offices in NYC or London). Offices are described as collaborative spaces with meals and drinks provided.
- Perks: Competitive salary, significant equity, unlimited holiday, L&D budget (courses/books/conferences), therapy coverage, private health insurance, company off-sites, office meals and drinks.
- Team: Small but growing fast (34 people, +80% YoY). Team spans multiple countries (US, UK, Canada) and departments (technical, product, design, clinical, operations). High ownership and impact for early employees.