Humans are unreliable narrators of their own behavior. Memory fails, incentives distort answers, and social pressure warps what people say away from what they actually do. Backed by General Catalyst, Felicis and Redpoint.
About 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.
What they're looking for
- The team has five credible feature opportunities but only enough capacity to pursue two. Determine which problems matter, what evidence would change the decision, and how to sequence the work without creating strategic drift
- A major customer request is valuable but highly specific. Find the underlying general problem and design a capability that serves the customer without turning the product into consulting software
- A new research capability produces impressive demonstrations but inconsistent user outcomes. Define the evaluations, interaction design, constraints, and rollout plan required before it becomes a product feature
- Product delivery is repeatedly blocked by missing platform primitives. Decide what belongs in Product Engineering, what belongs in Platform, and whether temporary embedding or shared ownership is the fastest durable path
- Two workstreams are moving quickly but making incompatible architectural choices. Establish the shared contract before the divergence becomes expensive
- A workflow is technically correct but users do not trust it. Diagnose whether the issue is product framing, interaction design, provenance, latency, model behavior, or actual quality—and direct the team toward evidence rather than opinion
More about this role
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.
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,...
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