Engineering Manager, Simulation

# Engineering Manager, Simulation Technical Staff Software Engineering NYC $280K – $425K
• Offers Equity## 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,…