Senior Backend Engineer

About Slingshot

We're a team of machine learning engineers training task-specific generative models for psychology. Our goal is to build an AI therapist to help people change their mind and their lives in the ways that they want to. We partner with organizations around the globe and power use cases, including AI-assisted crisis text response, 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, Series A startup backed by top-tier tech investors from a16z, Felicis, Menlo, TMV, SV Angel, Huggingface, ElevenLabs, Replit, 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.

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.

Your day to day responsibilities will be varied, one day collaborating on a new piece of functionality in the app, the next day working closely with our ML team to improve the scalability of our model deployments. 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

• You have solid experience working with backend service development in a fast paced environment, ideally using Kotlin or Java. You’ve likely used a few other languages too in your work, and can work full stack when needed.
• You have a good foundational understanding of big picture software development, including scaling, observability, data security, etc. You’ve likely been involved in setting up CI, deployments, and hosting solutions from scratch at some point in your career.
• You are a self starter and a keen learner, able to pick up new tools, languages, and concepts on the job. We don’t need you to be an ML engineer, but having an interest in AI helps!
• You are a team player. You own your own work but care about outcomes above all. You enjoy solving hard problems, especially when solving really them matters.
• You can ship fast. We work at lightning speed.

Requirements:

• 7+ years of software development experience, with emphasis on application backend services
• Experience working within the JVM ecosystem (Java, Kotlin, or Scala).
• Experience working in a fast-paced, <100 person startup environment
• Based in London or New York - we’re operating on a hybrid basis but love spending time together in person

Why you should take this job:

• You want to build things that matter. You love seeing your creations come to life and get used, whether that’s a small prototype demonstrator or foundations behind the scenes.
• You want first hand experience of AI and Machine Learning in practice. You’ll be part of a team that pushes the frontiers of how modern AI can be employed to make a difference.
• You want direct exposure and mentoring from a founding team with a successful exit and track record (Neil scaled Casper through IPO)
• You care about our mission, and are willing to do what it takes to make it happen

Why you shouldn’t take this job:

• You would rather be told exactly what to do than to act as an owner
• You see yourself as “fully formed” and would rather not have to learn new things on the job

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation (90th percentile)
• Hybrid environment, highly collaborative, fast-paced culture
• Work with a crazy passionate team that cares deeply about the impact of our work on mental health, especially in a post-AGI world