The posting
Slingshot AI
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.
THE ROLE
We’re hiring a leader to help shape how we approach trust and safety at Ash, in our model and in our product.
People bring deeply personal things to Ash. That creates difficult questions about how the product should behave, how we respond when something goes wrong, and how we protect people while respecting their privacy and autonomy. You’ll work alongside psychologists, researchers, and machine learning engineers to develop novel systems for AI in a sensitive domain.
You’ll help us answer hard, ambiguous questions about our model’s policy, investigate, research, develop new policies, and implement them, and communicate clearly about them to both internal and external audiences.
The role combines strategy, hands-on operations, and communication. You might spend one day working through a difficult safety decision with our clinical and legal teams, the next building a process for handling user reports, and the next writing an explanation of our approach for the public.
We’re looking for a thoughtful generalist who learns quickly, makes things happen, and cares deeply about getting this right.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Develop our principles and policies. Work through questions where safety, privacy, user autonomy, and product usefulness pull in different directions. Research the problem, seek expert input, and make a reasoned recommendation. You’ll work with our team, our advisors and experts and others to build principles for how to handle decisions.
- Turn ambiguous issues into clear decisions. Investigate user reports, emerging risks, and new requirements. Establish what we know, what remains uncertain, and what we should do next.
- Make the response work in practice. Build clear processes for triage, investigation, escalation, and follow-through. Define who does what, create the tools and documentation they need, and handle the operational details yourself.
- Turn learning into product improvements. Work with engineering, machine learning, clinical, and legal colleagues to translate findings into changes to Ash and the systems around it.
- Build, test, and improve quickly. For new systems, put a useful first version in place, learn from real cases, and refine it. Match the pace and level of review to the consequences of the decision.
- Write clearly, internally and externally. Produce policies, practical guidance, and public explanations of our safety approach. Help communicate our evaluations and findings, including their limitations. You’ll build initiatives or benchmarks we can share with the outside world to help us and the industry at large do better.
- Represent our thinking. Explain and defend our approach with partners, clinicians, and other audiences. Engage seriously with criticism and bring what you learn back into the work.
ABOUT YOU
- You have strong judgment. You can reason through a difficult question, weigh competing considerations, and recommend a course of action without pretending every answer is certain.
- You’re an excellent writer and communicator. You can turn complex thinking into clear, precise prose. You enjoy doing the research and developing the argument as much as writing the final piece. You can present well and understand how to communicate what we’re doing to the outside world.
- You’ve built something and made it better. It could be a product, an operational process, a program, or an independent project. You can show how you moved from an unclear problem to something people used, then improved it through feedback.
- You’re resourceful and hands-on. You’re willing to investigate individual cases, coordinate people, write the checklist, and follow up until the work is done.
- You seek out expertise without needing someone else to supply every answer. You know when to consult a clinician, engineer, lawyer, or researcher, and can turn their input into a practical decision.
- You’re intellectually curious and willing to change your mind. You can explain a time when evidence challenged your assumptions and changed your approach.
- You handle sensitive information with care and stay thoughtful under pressure. You recognize that this role will involve handling difficult topics on a regular basis including abuse, eating disorders, suicide and death. You can handle these topics maturely and know how to manage your own mental health, seeking support for yourself as needed.
- You care deeply about people’s mental health and the opportunity in front of us. You want more people to have access to good support, and you take responsibility for the trust that requires.
You might come from product, operations, consulting, law, policy, psychology, cognitive science, or another field that has taught you to think rigorously, write well, and execute. Clinical qualifications and previous trust and safety experience are useful, but neither is required.
