Head of Simulation Engineering

Aaru • New York, NY

3d • Onsite

About The Position

Aaru operates at the frontier of predictive intelligence, using AI to simulate and predict human behavior at scale. By generating and deploying instances of artificial intelligence that mirror humans, called agents, Aaru simulates entire populations with unprecedented accuracy. Our partners use Aaru to refine strategic positioning, identify and understand high-value audiences, validate concepts and messaging before launch, optimize pricing decisions, and build a continuously richer understanding of their customers through simulation. We provide organizations with invaluable foresight, empowering them to anticipate outcomes and proactively make the right decisions at the right time, every time. We're a small, dedicated, mission-driven team and we intend to stay that way. We believe the best work happens when exceptionally talented people are given ownership, trust and the space to operate without bureaucratic friction. We work with urgency and intellectual honesty and expect new team members to match our velocity. We seek individuals who thrive at the frontier, who push beyond conventional limits, who bring curiosity and conviction in equal measure, and who want their work to have demonstrable impact in the world. If you're energized by the idea of a small team doing things that feel impossible, let’s build together.

Requirements

• You have built and operated an AI-native product where model behavior was part of the product—not a feature hidden behind an API.
• You can take an ambiguous behavioral problem and turn it into a hypothesis, an evaluation, a system, and a shipped improvement.
• You have led engineers in a fast-moving environment and still enjoy doing the hardest technical work yourself.
• You design evaluations before you trust a result, and you treat unexplained model regressions as production incidents.
• You can turn research-grade code into a reproducible, testable, observable, and efficient system.
• You make clear tradeoffs among quality, latency, cost, reliability, and iteration speed.
• You communicate credibly with researchers, product engineers, deployment teams, and customers.
• You want to build in person, in New York, at high speed.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with coding agents, copilots, autonomous workflows, multi-agent systems, or other agentic products.
• Experience with post-training, model evaluation, inference systems, experimentation platforms, or LLM orchestration.
• Experience building simulation, synthetic-data, or distributed-compute systems at meaningful scale.
• Time as a founder or early engineer at a fast-growth AI company.

Responsibilities

• Own simulation quality in production across behavioral fidelity, calibration, latency, cost, reproducibility, and reliability.
• Define the architecture and operating model that carries a method from research prototype through evaluation, rollout, observation, and improvement.
• Build evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, ablations, graders, and regression tests that distinguish a faithful simulation from a merely plausible answer.
• Make large population runs observable and debuggable: version models, prompts, data, agent definitions, environments, and experiment configuration so results can be reproduced and explained.
• Partner with research to decide when a new method is ready to ship and what evidence is required before it becomes a customer-facing capability.
• Build tight feedback loops with deployment. Turn field failures and surprising outcomes into concrete hypotheses, experiments, fixes, and new research questions.
• Set clear interfaces and ownership across Simulation Research, Simulation Engineering, Infrastructure, and Platform.
• Hire, coach, and retain an exceptional team while continuing to unblock the hardest technical problems yourself.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed