Head of Population Simulation Research

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

Aaru operates at the frontier of predictive intelligence, using AI to simulate and predict human behavior  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.

Simulation research focuses on expanding what simulations can be as well as documenting and verifying that the systems today are worthy of trust. As the Head of Simulation Research, you will set Aaru’s research strategy in collaboration with the founders, conduct original research, and lead a team of researchers.

This is a hands‑on research leadership role. Someone successful will be a player‑coach; they’ll be able to get down in the weeds of day‑to‑day IC work alongside strategizing for long term plans. You will choose the bets to make, the way experiments are designed, and recruit exceptional people to join. While research at Aaru is exploratory, it’s not unconstrained – good research must eventually change what Aaru can build and measure.

• Define and continuously refine a coherent research agenda for individual behavior, group dynamics, and population‑level validity.

• Choose a small number of high‑leverage bets and establish the experiments, baselines, and decision criteria needed to evaluate them.

• Personally design and run experiments, build prototypes, analyze model behavior, and turn ambiguous findings into the next testable question.

• Develop new methods for agent construction, memory, interaction, behavioural calibration, population synthesis, and uncertainty estimation.

• Build evaluation frameworks that compare simulated behaviour with real observations and reveal where apparent success does not generalise.

• Establish high standards for reproducibility, falsifiability, negative results, and honest communication of limits.

• Partner closely with Simulation Engineering. Hand off validated methods with evidence, implementation insight, known failure modes, and clear production hypotheses.

• Hire, mentor, and lead a small team of exceptional researchers and research engineers.

• Build a longitudinal evaluation that tests whether an agent remains behaviourally coherent across changing contexts rather than merely sounding consistent.

• Reconstruct a real‑world decision or event, preregister the expected measurements, and test whether simulated sub‑groups reproduce observed outcomes.

• Design controlled experiments on information diffusion, coordination, polarisation, or social influence inside an agent population.

• Develop methods that calibrate…