Senior Production Systems Engineer - AI Platform, Scale

London

Full time

Engineering

• UK: £100K - £250K, offers equity
• US: $150K - $400K, offers equity

We aim to pay 90th percentile for the industry. All roles including 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 Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures, Forerunner Ventures, plus top-tier tech investors involved in ElevenLabs, Captions, Shopify, Plaid, Notion, Canva, Twitch, Airtable, and many others.

This is a chance to join a passionate team leveraging cutting-edge AI to improve mental health access globally. As a Member of Technical Staff focused on Production Engineering, you will build the platform that powers Ash at scale. You'll work across voice and AI stacks, internal services, and the data systems around them, improving observability, deployment, and platform tooling to scale reliably.

As a core member of a small but highly skilled team, we expect you to act as an owner and to care passionately about delivering value to our users and ultimately to make people's lives better. We are looking for builders who care deeply about the quality of their work and want to ship things that make a real difference in people's lives.

Our tech stack uses Dart/Flutter for the app, Kotlin for core backend services, Python for our ML work, 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.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of operating production systems at meaningful scale in high-growth, high-quality environments.
• Strong systems instincts and real opinions about latency, reliability, and cost. You know what breaks first under load, and you design around it.
• Driven by creating a world-class product with a world-class team, want to own what you build, and you're happy redesigning systems as production teaches you something new.
• Comfortable building across the full stack, a keen learner who picks up new languages, technology stacks, and concepts quickly.
• Experience working in a fast paced environment, taking systems from prototype to scaled production in weeks.

• Experience working on production AI inference or model serving systems.
• Experience working on realtime systems such as voice, live communications, or streaming.
• Experience working on large-scale data pipelines or evaluation systems.
• Experience working with ML codebases (we don't need you to be an ML Engineer, but having an interest in AI helps!)

• Collaborate within a cross-functional team spanning engineering, machine learning, and product to quickly design, build, and launch new features across the stack.
• Work comfortably across all parts of our stack, which includes core backend (Kotlin), ML scripts for evaluation, data processing, and inference (Python), low-level media streaming (Rust), the app (Dart/Flutter), and internal tooling (Next.js/TypeScript).
• Elevate user experience by continually refining the reliability, performance, and scalability of the systems behind Ash.
• Rapidly investigate, diagnose, and resolve production issues with a focus on latency, reliability, and cost.
• Take initiative to independently prototype new features based on customer feedback and your own product intuitions.

• 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