Forward Deployed Engineer

Artificial Societies (societies.ai) helps Fortune 500 organisations understand how real-world audiences think, feel, and respond — without the cost, delay, or limitations of traditional research. We build large-scale simulated populations grounded in real-world data, enabling clients to test messages, strategies, and concepts. Our clients love the ability to receive insights backed by millions of responses in hours rather than months, and to access previously inaccessible audiences (e.g. investors, CEOs, opinion leaders).

We're backed by Y Combinator, Point72 Ventures, and Kindred Capital, plus investors from DeepMind and Sequoia Scout, and work with leading organisations across technology, financial services, communications, and public affairs. We're a lean and highly effective team. We move fast, hold a high bar, and trust each other to own outcomes end-to-end. The culture is collaborative but low-ego: ideas win on merit, not seniority.

The Role

We're looking for Forward Deployed Engineers. You'll work directly with clients and strategists to build the simulated populations that power our most important engagements, then turn what you learn into capabilities that scale. This is not a standard software engineering role. You'll take a client briefing — who they want to simulate, what questions they need answered — and use our proprietary architecture to build the personas, assemble them into networks, and bring an artificial society to life. You'll integrate non-standard data sources, help client strategists implement complex simulation experiments in our system, and apply social data science to analyse and interpret simulation results.

The role also involves working closely with our research engineering team to identify repeated forward-deployed workflows and turn them into simulation engine capabilities. You'll build and improve the agentic system that deploys our simulation engine into client-facing workflows — closing the loop between what clients need and what the platform can do.

If you want to write code that directly shapes how the world's most important organisations make decisions, this is the role.

What You'll Do

• Build artificial societies from client briefs — take a briefing on who a client wants to simulate, then use our proprietary architecture to construct the personas, wire them into networks, and assemble a functioning artificial society. You'll develop deep intuition for what makes a simulated population credible and useful.
• Integrate non-standard data sources — bring in novel datasets and external signals to enrich our societies beyond standard builds. You'll figure out what data exists, how to ingest it, and how it improves simulation fidelity.
• Implement complex simulations — work alongside client strategists to implement simulation experiments that go beyond our standard workflows. You'll be the technical hands that bring ambitious research designs to life.
• Apply social data science to results — when clients need further clarification on methodological details or deeper analysis of results, you'll be the person who can interrogate the data rigorously and communicate what's happening beneath the surface.
• Productise forward-deployed workflows — work with the research engineering team to identify patterns in your client work and turn repeated workflows into core simulation engine capabilities.
• Build and improve our AI agents system — develop and refine the agentic layer that connects our simulation engine to client-facing workflows. You'll own the systems that make our technology usable at scale.

What We're Looking For

• Computational social science background. A background in social data science, network analysis, computational social science, or a related quantitative social science discipline. You understand how to think about populations, opinion dynamics, and social structure — not just data.
• Agentic AI experience. You've built or worked with agentic AI systems — orchestrating LLMs, managing tool use, or building multi-step automated workflows.
• Strong engineering basics. You write clean, production-grade Python and you're comfortable working across data pipelines, APIs, and AI systems. You've shipped code into real production environments. You work fluently with Git, participate in code reviews, and know how to build software as part of a team.
• Client-facing experience preferred. You've worked directly with external stakeholders — translating their needs into technical work and communicating results back clearly. You're comfortable in a room with senior clients.
• Ownership mentality. You don't wait for a ticket. You see the gap between what a client needs and what the platform does today, and you close it.

Logistics

Location: London, in-office. We build better together, and this role is no exception. Equity: 0.05% – 0.20%.

Why Join Now

This is one of the rare roles where you write code that directly changes how Fortune 500 firms, sovereign wealth funds, and global advisory firms make decisions. You'll work at the frontier of AI and human behaviour — building systems that simulate how real audiences think and respond. If you want engineering work that has immediate, visible impact on the highest-stakes decisions in the world, this is it.