AI Native Software Engineer

Location: London

Employment Type: Full time

Department: Engineering

Compensation: £60K – £120K. Offers Equity. We aim to pay 90th percentile for the industry. All roles include meaningful equity ownership.

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 top‑tier tech investors.

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. 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 You'll Do: You'll learn fast and build constantly. Concretely, you'll:

• Ship features to the Ash app that users interact with, end to end (app, backend, through our modelling stack).
• Build internal tooling that enables our whole team, letting our designers ship for themselves, our trust and safety people scale themselves with AI, and turn ideas into live products faster than anyone would think possible.
• Push our AI‑native development forward, finding where AI can allow one person to do the work of five.
• Work closely with leadership to run Slingshot as an AI‑native company, not just one that builds AI.

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.