Head of Simulation Engineering

association of arab universities; New York (NY); On-site; USD 425,000 - 525,000; Full time

Job summary

Aaru is seeking a Head of Simulation Engineering in New York City to lead and shape the interface used by research, platform, and infrastructure teams. This hands-on leadership role requires designing systems, writing and reviewing code, and expanding the simulation engineering team to deliver high-stakes AI-driven simulations.

The role combines technical depth with people leadership, aiming to build an exceptional team while driving performance, reliability, and fast iteration in a fast-moving

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.

Job description

Location: New York City · In person, five days a week
Compensation: $425,000-$525,000 base

ABOUT AARU

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.

The role

Simulation engineering builds, tests, and evaluates methods of simulation and deploys them into production. For deployment, methods must be accurate, calibrated, fast, measurable, and reliable. Day-to-day work resembles building a great AI-native product, albeit with much higher stakes—rather than informing an email draft or a Python file, these simulations determine new market entries, product decisions, and acquisitions.

As the Head of Simulation Engineering, you will build and lead the interface that the research, platform, and infrastructure teams use. This is a hands-on leadership role reporting directly to the founders. Early on, you will design systems, write and review code, debug model behavior, and expand the team of simulation engineers. As it expands, you will move to building the organization out, hiring managers and formalizing functions while still staying grounded in the day-to-day technical work.

What you will do

• 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.

Representative problems

• A method improves an offline benchmark but changes customer conclusions unpredictably. Determine why and establish the evidence required for rollout.

• Two population runs with the same inputs diverge. Find the source of nondeterminism and make every material dependency inspectable.

• A simulation is directionally accurate overall but miscalibrated for an important subgroup. Build the diagnostics and correction loop.

• Reduce the cost and latency of a hundred-thousand agent run without eroding behavioral fidelity or hiding uncertainty.

• Turn a fragile research workflow into a self-serve system with automated guardrails, launch criteria, monitoring, and rollback.

You might thrive in this role if

• 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.

Strong candidates may also have

• 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.

Success in this role looks like

• Aaru has one trusted, legible quality bar from research experiments through customer deployment.

• New simulation methods move into production faster because evaluation, rollout, and observability are built into the system.

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

• Research, Platform, and deployments have clear interfaces and fast feedback loops.

• A small, exceptional Simulation Engineering team owns the system end to end.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary of $425,000-$525,000, equity, and full benefits. Final compensation depends on experience and sits within our internal bands.