Engineering Manager - Simulation

About Aaru

Aaru builds simulations of human behavior. Each simulation contains a population of AI agents, each representing a person who could plausibly exist in the real world and capable of making decisions within a modeled environment. Companies and institutions use these simulations to test consequential choices before committing—from product launches and pricing decisions to strategic communications and policy changes.

Building a useful simulation requires more than generating plausible text. Populations must represent real people and groups; predictions must be calibrated; simulations must remain coherent as conditions change; and the product must make the resulting evidence legible enough to support real decisions.

We are a small, in-person team in New York. We work with urgency, high ownership, and intellectual honesty. We expect people to surface inconvenient evidence, change their minds quickly, and carry important work all the way to a result.

About Simulation Engineering

Simulation Engineering owns the path from a promising research result to a production system that customers can trust. Researchers may prove a new method for constructing a population, modeling a world, estimating an outcome, or evaluating fidelity. Simulation Engineering turns that method into robust, reusable, observable, and efficient software.

The team's quality bar is broader than conventional service reliability. A production simulation must be behaviorally faithful, calibrated, reproducible, measurable, fast enough to use, economical enough to scale, and reliable under real customer workloads. The team owns the abstractions, contracts, evaluation gates, workflows, and operating systems that make those properties possible.

Simulation Engineering is not a research-support queue. It is the engineering owner of the simulation system in production. When a simulation method breaks, regresses, becomes too expensive, or produces conclusions that cannot be explained, this team is accountable for finding the cause and restoring trust.

The role

As Simulation Engineering Manager, you will lead a focused team of Simulation Engineers and be accountable for the quality, pace, and operational health of Aaru's production simulation system. Managers at Aaru remain engineers. You will set technical direction, review critical designs, write and debug code when needed, inspect model and system failures, hire exceptional engineers, and develop the people on the team.

You will operate at the interface of Simulation Research, Population Research, Prediction Research, Evaluation Research, Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure, and Deployment. A major part of the job is establishing explicit handoffs and shared evidence: what a research result must demonstrate before productionization, what the production system must expose for evaluation, and how field failures return to the right research or engineering owner.

This is a line-management role. You are responsible for making one team exceptionally effective, not for building a layer of managers beneath you. You should expect to remain close to architecture, code, experiments, incidents, and the hardest technical tradeoffs.

What you will do

• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of Simulation Engineers with clear ownership of production simulation quality.

• Own quality across behavioral fidelity, calibration, reproducibility, latency, throughput, cost, reliability, debuggability, and safe operation.

• Define the architecture and operating model that carries a method from research prototype through evaluation, integration, rollout, observation, and continuous improvement.

• Establish clear readiness criteria with Research and Evaluation: strong baselines, decisive experiments, protected holdouts, known limitations, and evidence that survives changes in domain, population, and time.

• Design and maintain the core abstractions of the simulation system, including agent and population representations, simulation contracts, environment and state models, workflow boundaries, evaluation interfaces, and publication layers.

• Build evaluation harnesses, benchmarks, ablations, graders, regression suites, and launch scorecards that distinguish a faithful simulation from a merely plausible output.

• Make large simulation runs reproducible and inspectable by versioning models, prompts, data, populations, environments, code, and experiment configuration.

• Build observability that connects system behavior to model behavior: traces, intermediate artifacts, cohort diagnostics, cost and latency curves, failure classification, and comparison across versions.

• Set technical direction for scaling large population runs without concealing uncertainty or trading away the fidelity that makes the simulation useful.

• Partner with Product Engineering to adapt the simulation system for new product goals while preserving valid contracts and avoiding product-specific forks in the core engine.

• Build fast feedback loops with Deployment. Convert field failures, surprising customer outcomes, and operational incidents into concrete hypotheses, durable tests, fixes, and research questions.

• Own the team's production operations, including on-call health, incident response, release safety, rollback, maintenance, and the elimination of recurring operational toil.

• Recruit exceptional engineers, provide direct feedback, develop technical leaders, and address performance or ownership gaps early.

• Improve engineering practice across Aaru by raising the bar for experimental discipline, production code, technical design, reproducibility, and post-incident learning.

Representative leadership problems

You might be responsible for situations such as:

• A new method improves an offline benchmark but changes customer conclusions unpredictably. Determine whether the issue is contamination, objective mismatch, population shift, nondeterminism, orchestration, or product interpretation—and define the evidence required for rollout.

• Two simulations with nominally identical inputs produce materially different outputs. Trace every source of state and randomness, quantify the acceptable variance, and make the result reproducible enough to explain.

• Aggregate accuracy improves while performance for an important subgroup deteriorates. Build the diagnostics and release policy that prevent the average from hiding the failure.

• A hundred-thousand-agent run is too slow and expensive for the product roadmap. Find the right combination of algorithmic changes, batching, caching, model selection, inference strategy, and approximation without eroding fidelity.

• A research workflow works only in one person's notebook. Turn it into a self-serve production path with typed contracts, tests, experiment tracking, guardrails, monitoring, and rollback.

• Product Engineering needs a new simulation interaction that violates assumptions in the existing engine. Decide whether to extend the core abstraction, introduce a separate mode, or change the product design.

• An incident cannot be attributed because the relevant model, prompt, data, and population versions were not captured. Fix the immediate problem and redesign the system so the class of failure cannot remain invisible.

• The team is handling too many fragile research handoffs. Establish a shared productionization contract that raises throughput without turning Research or Simulation Engineering into a ticket queue.

How we work

We treat model and simulation behavior as production behavior. An unexplained regression is not an acceptable mystery; it is an incident to be measured, localized, and converted into a lasting test. A method is not ready because it produced an impressive example. It is ready when the evidence supports the intended claim, its limits are known, and the production system can reproduce and observe it.

We design evaluations before trusting a result. Strong baselines, ablations, temporal separation, subgroup analysis, and prospective outcomes matter. We optimize cost and latency only in relation to quality, and we refuse optimizations that make a system faster by making its uncertainty or errors harder to see.

Management is hands-on and high-context. The goal is to create clear interfaces, strong technical leaders, and an operating system that lets the team move faster with less hidden risk—not to centralize every decision in the manager.

You might thrive in this role if

• You were a strong software, machine-learning, or systems engineer before becoming a manager and remain comfortable going deep in code and architecture.

• You have led a small engineering team that shipped and operated an AI, ML, data, or distributed system in production.

• You understand that model behavior is part of the product and can debug failures that cross data, prompts, orchestration, statistical assumptions, services, and user-facing outputs.

• You can take an underspecified research method and turn it into a deterministic, testable, observable, and efficient production system.

• You design evaluations before trusting improvements and can distinguish benchmark movement from a meaningful gain in real-world quality.

• You make clear tradeoffs among fidelity, calibration, latency, cost, reliability, maintainability, and iteration speed.

• You build effective working relationships with researchers without lowering the engineering bar or imposing process that destroys research velocity.

• You give clear feedback, develop technical judgment in others, and address performance or ownership problems promptly.

• You can recruit unusually strong engineers and explain why this work demands both research sensitivity and production rigor.

• You want to work in person in New York with a team that moves quickly and takes direct responsibility for its systems.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with LLM applications, agentic systems, multi-agent frameworks, model orchestration, or inference-time computation.

• Experience with model evaluation, post-training, experimentation platforms, synthetic data, forecasting systems, or probabilistic models.

• Experience building simulation, scientific-computing, distributed-compute, workflow, or data-intensive systems at meaningful scale.

• Experience with reproducible experimentation, model and data versioning, feature stores, observability for ML systems, or safe model rollout.

• A research background or a record of close collaboration with research teams, including reading papers and translating experimental methods into software.

• Time as a founder, founding engineer, or early engineering leader at a fast-growing AI company.

• Experience building and operating teams through rapid growth while preserving a high technical bar.

Candidates need not have

• Prior employment at a simulation company or formal training in computational social science.

• Managed managers or a large organization; this role is about direct leadership of a focused technical team.

• Expertise in every relevant research method. We care about engineering depth, empirical judgment, and the ability to learn enough to make correct production decisions.

What success looks like

• Aaru has a trusted, legible quality bar from research experiment through customer deployment.

• New methods reach production faster because evaluation, integration, rollout, observability, and rollback are built into a repeatable system.

• Large simulation runs are reproducible; material dependencies are versioned; regressions are caught early; and failures can be traced to concrete causes.

• Quality, latency, cost, reliability, and subgroup performance are visible and managed as explicit product properties.

• Research, Evaluation, Product Engineering, Platform, Infrastructure, and Deployment have clear interfaces and fast feedback loops with the team.

• The team owns production incidents and converts each important failure into stronger abstractions, tests, or research questions.

• Strong engineers join, grow, and become capable of independently leading difficult simulation workstreams.

• Customers can trust that a simulation capability has passed a meaningful, evidence-based production standard rather than an informal demo threshold.

Location and benefits

This role is based in New York City. Aaru is an in-person company, working five days a week in the office. Candidates should be located in the New York metropolitan area or open to relocation.

Aaru offers a competitive base salary, equity participation, comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage, visa sponsorship and relocation support, and other benefits and perks. Final compensation depends on level and experience and is set within Aaru's internal bands.