Technical Ex-Founder

Ash by Slingshot AI; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Travel between NYC and London offices

Learning budget

Personal therapy coverage

Job summary

Ash by Slingshot AI is seeking Technical Ex-Founders to join our Engineering team in London or NYC. If you founded or led early technical efforts, own substantial production code, and thrive on shipping high-impact features, this role is for you.

You’ll work autonomously on a wide range of problems, shaping product direction, talking to users, building solutions, and iterating quickly. Proficiency across our stack and a learn‑fast mindset are valued above all.

Qualifications

• Founded or led a startup's early technical team with production code experience.
• 6+ years of hands-on engineering experience in production environments.
• Interest in AI/ML and ability to work within AI/ML codebases (not required to be an ML engineer).

Responsibilities

• Own large set of engineering problems from concept to production.
• Define problems, talk to users, build solutions, and iterate.

Skills

Startup founder

Hands-on engineer

AI/ML interest

Kotlin

Python

Dart/Flutter

TypeScript

Rust

GCP

Job description

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.

Our team spans machine learning, product, engineering, conversational design, clinical, growth, and operations, with offices in both New York City and London.

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 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, and 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

Compensation Range: £100K - £250K