Founding Engineer
Remote · Full-time
Most products don’t fail because of bad engineering. They fail because nobody wanted them. Teams skip research and guess or follow gut, which is expensive.
AskReplicas is a computational model of human populations millions of synthetic people with real demographics, real psychographics, and real decision-making patterns. Grounded in census data, behavioral science, live market signals, and real-time consumer sentiment. Always current. No fictional personas. No hallucinated opinions. Statistically validated behavioral simulation at population scale.
Survey them across 6 research modes in minutes.
We’re building toward our own proprietary model. We need the person who will help us get there while keeping everything running at scale.
Role Description
You’ll be the first founding engineer we hire. Half of this role is ML designing, training, and evaluating proprietary models that make our behavioral simulation more accurate, more efficient, and harder to replicate. The other half is systems, building the infrastructure that makes those models usable at production scale for thousands of concurrent users.
We’re currently experimenting with hybrid LLM + probabilistic simulation systems and reinforcement-style feedback loops from user interaction data.
This isn’t a prompt-engineering role dressed up as ML. We are building real model training pipelines, and we need someone who knows what that actually involves.
But along with the skills, we’re looking for someone who genuinely believes this is the right direction; synthetic populations trained on real human behavior will become a fundamental tool for how products get built and decisions get made. If you think that’s true, this role will feel obvious. If you’re not sure, it probably isn’t the right fit.
What You’ll Own
- Design and train proprietary models for behavioral simulation. Own the training pipeline, evaluation methodology, and research direction alongside the founder and other engineers.
- Own the infrastructure that keeps the simulation running fast and reliably as we grow distributed job processing, real-time updates, horizontal scaling, database performance. You’ll make architectural decisions that matter.
What You’ve Done Before
- You have trained and shipped ML models in production (not just API calls or notebooks)
- Built backend or distributed systems at real scale
- Understand human behavior, psychometrics, or decision science deeply enough to model it
- Have scaled a product and remember what broke when it grew
- Have seen systems break under load and understand why
- Prefer correctness and signal over superficial outputs
- Bonus: experience working at startups that have raised strong funding
What You’ll Get
- Meaningful founding equity
- A technical founder who writes code and has strong opinions
- A live product with real users, real data, and real feedback loops
- A hard research problem: behavioral fidelity at population scale
- A small team to lead: junior engineers and designers under your guidance
How to Apply
If this resonates and you believe synthetic populations will fundamentally change how decisions get made, reach out to us.
Before applying, please spend time with the product. It’s free: askreplicas.ai
We care deeply about signal, and the best candidates will have strong, informed opinions about what we’re building.
After trying it, we also ask you to share structured feedback here: askreplicas.ai/beta-feedback
When you reach out, please include:
- What you’ve built that’s relevant (ML systems, infrastructure, or anything related to modeling human behavior at scale)
- Why this problem is interesting to you
- Your honest thoughts after using AskReplicas, what feels strong, what feels missing, and what you would improve
We’re especially interested in people who think critically about the product. Clear conviction matters, but clear critique matters just as much.
If you don’t resonate with the product direction, this is probably not the right role.
No recruiters. The founder reads everything.