AI Safety Manager

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

Ash is a wellness app that gives people a place to talk through stress, anxiety, relationships or a bad day. It isn’t a replacement for therapy. People find it useful for everyday issues.

People bring deeply personal things to Ash, so new safety questions come up all the time, from user conversations, customer support, researchers and partners. We build our safety policy from what’s actually happening with our users and keep adding to it. We’re hiring someone to own this work full time: researching each issue, getting input from the right experts and deciding what Ash should do.

Safety work at Slingshot runs across teams. You’ll report to our General Counsel, who leads our regulatory work, and work closely with our machine learning, engineering, clinical and research teams to put our policies into practice.

Key responsibilities

• Build and grow our policy book. Take each new issue and turn it into a clear working policy. Pull together the relevant regulation, professional guidance, clinical practice, ethics and research, then make a reasoned judgment call.

• Bring in the right experts. Work with lawyers, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, philosophers and researchers, including our own clinical and research team and our advisors, and use their input to make practical decisions.

• Work through hard trade-offs. Many safety questions pose conflicting goals, such as protecting other people against a user’s privacy, or steering someone toward a safer choice against respecting their autonomy. Help decide where we come down and set the process for making those calls.

• 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.

• Set priorities. Help the team decide which safety issues to tackle first, and give the people building safety features clear answers.

• Turn policy into how Ash behaves. Each policy defines when it applies and what Ash should and shouldn’t do. Policies will feed directly into model training and into the guardrails, safe modes and banners that shape Ash’s responses, so they need to be clear and concrete, with examples of good and bad responses.

• 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.

• Keep policy in step with the law. Work with our General Counsel to update our policies and practices as new laws and requirements come in.

• Write clearly, internally and externally. Produce policies, practical guidance and public explanations of our safety approach, and help communicate our findings, including their limitations. Over time, build initiatives or benchmarks we can share to help the industry 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 understand AI. You know how people talk to AI, what might go wrong, and what controls a company does and doesn’t have (and should build). You don’t need to be a programmer. You might come from law, bioethics, philosophy, medicine, psychology, product management, engineering or another field.

• You enjoy writing policy. You like pulling together many sources, from research and regulation to expert opinion, and deciding what our position should be.

• You’ve worked professionally, ideally at a startup, where people build and do things, sometimes without a lot of guidance.

• You have strong judgment. You can reason through a difficult question, weigh competing considerations and reach a decision without pretending every answer is certain.

• You’re open-minded. You don’t assume you already know the answers, and you can describe a time when evidence changed your approach.

• You can handle a lot at once. You’ll work on many problems with many inputs, often at the same time.

• You learn fast and seek input. You can get up to speed on an unfamiliar subject quickly. Your instinct is to get input from others before deciding, and then you make the call.

• You’re an excellent researcher, writer and communicator. You use AI research tools well, and you can write clearly about complex questions, whether for a policy document or a public audience. You present well.

• 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 handle sensitive information with care and stay thoughtful under pressure.

• You care about people’s mental health and want more people to have access to good support.

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