Physics Simulation Team Lead

Stand Insurance•San Francisco, CA

3d•$210,000 - $250,000•Onsite

About The Position

Stand is a new technology and insurance company revolutionizing how society assesses, mitigates, and adapts to climate risks. Our leadership team has extensive experience in insurance, technology, and climate science: building billions in market value at prior ventures. At Stand, we are rethinking how insurance enables proactive, science-driven resilience. Existing insurance models often rely on broad exclusions, leaving homeowners without options. At Stand, we leverage advanced deterministic models and cutting-edge analytics to provide personalized risk assessments—helping homeowners secure coverage and take proactive steps toward resilience. Why Join Stand: At Stand, you’ll join a mission-driven team redefining insurance through the lens of climate resilience, building a transformative, data-driven insurance model with real-world impact for homeowners and communities on the front lines of climate change. The Opportunity: As a Physics Simulation Team Lead on the Applied Science team, you will lead the development of Stand’s physics-based simulation capabilities across wildfire and future perils. This role begins as a hands-on technical lead and evolves into a people leader as the team scales. Physics-based simulation is a core pillar at Stand. You will help transform traditionally high-cost, bespoke engineering workflows into scalable, validated, production-ready systems that directly power real-world risk decisions and drive tangible business outcomes. You will remain deeply embedded in CFD, FEA, and multiphysics solvers, while shaping how simulations connect across scales, inform probabilistic risk models, and integrate with AI-driven acceleration techniques. This position is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, creates structure from ambiguity, owns outcomes end to end, collaborates effectively across disciplines, and is energized by building from zero to one.

Requirements

PhD or Master’s degree in a relevant field, with 5+ years of hands-on experience leading and executing CFD-based simulations, including design, execution, and validation.
Experience as a technical lead, managing projects or teams in highly dynamic, fast-paced environments.
Strong attention to detail and succinct communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to set technical direction and prioritize modeling work, balancing research depth, delivery timelines, and business impact.
Proficiency with Fortran-based solvers, including running, modifying, and extending existing codebases; fluency in C++, Python, or similar languages for scripting, integration, and tooling; industry experience working with high-performance compute and parallel processing workflows
Strong modeling mathematical intuition - able to make sound tradeoffs between fidelity, runtime, and uncertainty, and to identify the highest-leverage improvements without exhaustive experimentation.
Highly self-motivated, with a “run-through walls to get the problem solved” method, self-directed, proactive, and adaptable; comfortable operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where problems, interfaces, and priorities evolve over time.

Nice To Haves

Experience applying physics-based simulation to natural hazards, climate, or risk modeling (e.g., wildfire, wind, flood).
Experience working directly with business units or product teams on customer or client-facing technology.
Prior experience as a people manager in startup or high-growth environments.
Experience designing and owning multiscale or multiphysics simulation pipelines, including coordinating validation efforts across models, data sources, and teams.
Hands-on experience with reduced-order modeling, surrogate models, or uncertainty quantification techniques.
Experience integrating physics-based models with machine learning systems for acceleration or inference.

Responsibilities

Act as the functional technical lead for the growing physics simulation sub-team within the Applied Science group, coordinating work across scales and perils while establishing and pioneering workflows, modeling standards, and validation practices.
Own the overall physics simulation roadmap, including solver development, model tuning, and validation, as well as prioritizing modeling investments across wildfire and future perils based on feasibility, impact, and business needs.
Partner with recruiting to build the simulation sub-team, contributing to interviewing and onboarding early hires and laying the foundation for player-coach leadership as the team scales.
Design and lead expansion into new perils (e.g., wind, flood), including uncertainty scoping, validation milestones, and ownership swimlanes—standing up wholesale new engineering workflows end-to-end (necessitating getting hands dirty diving deep and learning quickly
Guide the development of probabilistic risk mechanisms from deterministic physics models using computationally efficient approaches (e.g., surrogate or reduced-order methods).
Collaborate closely across Applied Science and the full company, including with ML engineers and product teams, and communicate modeling decisions and tradeoffs clearly to leadership and partners.