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 Product Engineering

Product Engineering turns Aaru's simulation capabilities into products that customers can use independently and repeatedly. The team builds on Aaru's shared platform and simulation systems to create the workflows, interfaces, integrations, and decision-ready artifacts that make a technically sophisticated system feel clear and dependable.

The function is designed around durable product domains rather than a queue of disconnected features. Those domains may include simulation setup, question and experiment types, follow-up and continuous simulations, analysis and reporting, reusable customer templates, collaboration, and external integrations.

Product Engineering is not a thin presentation layer and it is not a forward-deployed services team. It owns end-to-end product outcomes, while working through explicit interfaces with Platform Engineering, Simulation Engineering, Research, Product, Design, and Deployment.

The role

As Product Engineering Manager, you will lead a focused team of Product Engineers and be accountable for the quality, pace, and impact of what the team ships. Managers at Aaru remain builders. You will set technical direction, shape product decisions, review critical designs, write and debug code when it is the highest-leverage use of your time, hire exceptional engineers, and develop the people already on the team.

You will partner closely with a Product Manager and Product Designer. Together, you will select problems, define the product domain, and establish a roadmap that balances immediate customer value with reusable product foundations. You will also create the operating mechanisms that let multiple workstreams move quickly without losing clarity, quality, or ownership.

This is a line-management role, not a distant function-head role. Your primary responsibility is to make a small team unusually effective: give people context, set a high bar, resolve ambiguity, provide direct feedback, and ensure that commitments become excellent production systems.

What you will do

Build, lead, and develop a high-performing team of Product Engineers with clear ownership, strong technical judgment, and a high standard for product craft.

Set technical direction for the team's product domain across frontend, backend, APIs, data models, workflow orchestration, integrations, observability, and model-dependent behavior.

Partner with Product and Design to identify the most important user problems, define a coherent roadmap, and make principled decisions about scope and sequence.

Create an execution model for parallel workstreams: clear DRIs, credible milestones, early risk discovery, focused reviews, and fast escalation when dependencies or assumptions fail.

Stay close to the work through system design, architecture reviews, code review, debugging, product critique, user sessions, and direct contribution to the hardest or most ambiguous problems.

Ensure that the team turns specific customer evidence into generalizable product capabilities rather than accumulating custom branches, configuration debt, or manual operations.