Simulation Engineering Manager — NYC Production AI Systems

Aaru Inc.; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 425,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Aaru in New York City seeks an Engineering Manager for Simulation to lead a focused team of Simulation Engineers and own the quality, pace, and operational health of our production simulation system.

You will set technical direction, review critical designs, and contribute code when needed, while building the people and processes that sustain high ownership, fast delivery, and rigorous evidence across research, evaluation, and deployment.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Job description

Aaru in New York City seeks an Engineering Manager for Simulation to lead a focused team of Simulation Engineers and own the quality, pace, and operational health of our production simulation system.

You will set technical direction, review critical designs, and contribute code when needed, while building the people and processes that sustain high ownership, fast delivery, and rigorous evidence across research, evaluation, and deployment.