Senior Backend Engineer, Slingshot AI
3-5 days a week in office
Foundational model for psychology
Open for applications
Foundational model for psychology
1-20 employees
Open for applications
3-5 days a week in office
1-20 employees
Company mission
To use AI to make Mental Health Care more accessible.
Role
Who you are
- 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
- 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
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
Our take
Use-cases of machine learning in the previous three decades have gone from the impressive but impractical achievements of beating Chess Grand Masters to being integral to some of the world’s most used commercial applications like Google Search.
Slingshot is taking Large Language Models in a new direction, using its machine-learning tools to train generative AI in deep psychology. The aim is to build machine learning models that can perform modern therapy through Ash, set to be the first AI counselor, driving down the cost of mental healthcare.
Slingshot is attempting to democratize access to mental health care through the increasingly complex capabilities of ML. What started for Slingshot as a general exploration of machine learning has developed into a potentially significant and singular product. Whilst the proof will be in the pudding, Ash still being in development, Slingshot has won investor confidence evidenced by its $6 million seed fundign round in 2022.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jan 2025
$40m
SERIES A
Aug 2024
$30m
SEED
Total funding: $76.2m
Company benefits
- Hybrid environment, highly collaborative, fast-paced culture
- Unparalleled growth opportunity - learn faster than you would anywhere else
- Have a massive impact on the next generation of ML engineering
- Work with a passionate team that cares about creating an AI world that's not winner-takes-all
- Learning and development budget
- Company offsites and events
- Lunch on us when you are in the office
Company values
- Bias towards Action
- Authenticity - we keep it real and we say it like it is
- Strong opinions, loosely held
- We're nowhere near the end of history
Company HQ
Civic Center, New York, NY
Leadership
Daniel Reid Cahn
(CEO)Graduated with a Master's at Imperial with distinction and an award for novel work in Deep Reinforcement Learning. Prior to Slingshot, they were a Machine Learning Engineer at Instabase filing two patents that redirected the strategy of the company at large.
Neil Parikh
(Co-founder)Neil is co-founder of Casper, the global sleep company which he helped grow to over $500million in revenue and IPO'd in 2020.
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