Head of Infrastructure

About Aaru

Aaru builds simulations of human behavior. Each simulation contains a population of 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 policy changes to critical communications. Because the agents are simulated rather than recruited, they can reason through complex hypotheticals without fatigue or the response effects common in human studies.

The role

At Aaru, infrastructure sets the limits of the product. A simulation may contain hundreds of thousands of agents, each consuming compute, maintaining state, and making decisions. They must run quickly and cheaply enough that customers can test another scenario while the answer still matters. Every improvement in speed, scale, or cost expands what Aaru can simulate and what customers can use it for.

You will own this system end to end and report directly to the founders. You will set the technical direction, build the infrastructure team, and remain an active engineer: designing core systems and writing production code.

What you will do

• Own all compute, orchestration, data, and serving infrastructure for our simulations.

• Design the systems that run millions of concurrent agents efficiently.

• Set the infrastructure roadmap: cost, reliability, scale, and iteration speed.

• Build and lead the Infrastructure team. Hire its first dedicated members.

• Own reliability and incident response, and keep the on-call load humane.

• Treat cloud spend as a first-class product constraint, and drive it down.

• Partner with research and platform so new capabilities reach customers fast.

You might be a good fit if

• You built and operated large-scale distributed systems: schedulers, inference fleets, data pipelines, or similar.

• You made a large system dramatically cheaper or faster, and you can show the numbers.

• You have led engineers before, and you still write code every week.

• You make one-way-door decisions carefully and two-way-door decisions fast.

• You want to build in person, in New York, at high speed.

Strong candidates may also have

• Experience with GPU fleets, ML inference at scale, or agentic workloads.

• Experience at the founding stage of an infrastructure function.

• Open-source work in the infrastructure space.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary of $425,000–$525,000, equity, and full benefits. Final compensation depends on experience and sits within our internal bands.