Postdoctoral Clinical Research Scientist

About the role

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 are hiring a Postdoctoral Clinical Research Scientist to build the evidence base for AI-delivered mental health care. Reporting to the Head of Research, you will design and run the studies that tell us whether Ash is safe, whether it works, and where it needs to get better, then publish what we learn.

This is a fixed-term role of one to two years, based in New York City (hybrid), with potential to convert. If you're interested in pursuing psychology licensure in New York, we'll support you in getting there too.

The field is moving faster than the literature. Your job is to make sure our science stays ahead of it: to invent evaluation methods where none exist yet, to run rigorous studies on a product that ships weekly, and to work shoulder to shoulder with product, engineering, and machine learning so that what you find actually changes what we build.

Key responsibilities

- Design, run, and analyze clinical studies on AI-based mental health tools: RCTs, observational studies, product-embedded experiments, and HEOR studies assessing cost-effectiveness and healthcare utilization impact.

- Build and validate novel evaluation methods for conversational AI quality and safety, including LLM-as-judge frameworks for scoring clinical fidelity, empathy, and risk at scale.

- Lead manuscript preparation for peer-reviewed journals and represent our research at conferences.

- Collaborate across clinical, product, engineering, legal, and policy to make sure our research is both rigorous and actionable, and that findings reach the people who can act on them.

- Translate what we learn into sharper measurement: what we track, how we define outcomes, and what evidence we need next.

About you

- You have a PhD in Clinical Psychology or a related field.

- You have a strong track record designing and executing clinical research, with solid grounding in methodology, language data analysis, psychometrics, and statistical analysis (R, Python, or similar).

- You have a publication record in peer-reviewed journals.

- You're familiar with evidence-based psychotherapy frameworks and clinical outcome measurement.

- Experience with digital health, telehealth, or AI/ML applications in clinical care is a strong plus.

- You're a strong communicator who can translate clinical findings for non-clinical audiences without losing the nuance that matters.

- You're comfortable working fast and iteratively, in a field where the research has to pull ahead of the technology rather than trail behind it.

- You have genuine conviction about the mission. This work only matters if the people doing it believe it does.

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