Lead Product Engineer

Artificial Societies operates at the frontier of predictive intelligence, using AI to simulate and predict human behaviour at scale. By generating and deploying instances of artificial intelligence that mirror humans, called agents, Artificial Societies simulates entire populations with unprecedented accuracy. Our partners work with us for many reasons: they leverage Artificial Societies to refine strategy in volatile geopolitical climates, cut new product innovation timelines from months to minutes, and deploy marketing campaigns that win in an era where consumers have never been harder to understand. We provide organisations with invaluable foresight, empowering them to anticipate outcomes and proactively make the right decisions at the right time, every time.

We're a small, dedicated, mission-driven team and we intend to stay that way. We believe the best work happens when exceptionally talented people are given ownership, trust, and the space to operate without bureaucratic friction. We work with urgency and intellectual honesty and expect new team members to match our velocity. We seek individuals who thrive at the frontier, who push beyond conventional limits, who bring curiosity and conviction in equal measure, and who want their work to have demonstrable impact in the world. If you're energised by the idea of a small team doing things that feel impossible, let's build together.

About the role

What you'll do

• Own features end to end. Scope, design, build, ship, and iterate. From the front-end interaction down through the API to the database, you'll be responsible for the whole vertical slice and the outcome it drives.
• Own the architecture. Make the calls on system design, data models, and API contracts that keep the product fast, reliable, and easy to build on as it grows.
• Work directly with design and the CTO. Translate a design and a product vision into something real, pushing back and contributing ideas of your own. You'll have genuine ownership over what gets built and how it works.
• Partner with FDEs and research engineers. Take the capabilities they build at the frontier of our simulation engine and turn them into reliable, intuitive features that scale to every client.
• Build for performance and reliability. Make features fast, robust, and trustworthy. Our clients make high-stakes decisions on our product; it has to work, every time.
• Raise the bar on craft. Bring taste and attention to detail to everything you ship, and set the standard the rest of engineering builds to.

What we're looking for

• At least 5+ years as a software, design, or product engineer. You've shipped real product to real users, owned features from idea to production, and been the engineer others turn to when the problem is hard.
• Expert in TypeScript, ideally Python too. You write clean, well-structured TypeScript and are comfortable across the stack. Productivity in Python is a strong plus: it's the language of our simulation engine.
• Deep systems expertise. You reason fluently about the whole stack: rendering performance in the browser, API latency budgets, caching, concurrency, and queueing. When something is slow or flaky, you can find out why wherever the problem lives.
• Advanced database skills. You design schemas that last and fix the ones that didn't: indexing strategy, query planning, and zero-downtime migrations, preferably in Postgres.
• Architecture that survives scale. You've designed systems that grew: you've drawn the service boundaries, made the build-vs-buy calls, and defined API contracts that other engineers and systems depend on.
• Great taste. You have strong instincts for what makes a feature feel intuitive, and you sweat the details that turn something functional into something people love to use.
• Fluent with AI coding agents. You're very comfortable working with Claude Code, Codex, or similar harnesses, and you know how to get great work out of them while keeping a high bar on what ships.
• Ownership mentality. You don't wait for a ticket. You see what needs to happen, and you make it happen end to end.

Nice to have

• You've built user-facing production grade AI agents.
• Spent time creating and managing infrastructure.
• You've seen a company go from seed to millions in ARR.
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading a small team.

Logistics

• Location: London, in-office 5 days a week. We build better together, and this role is no exception.
• Salary: £100,000 - £180,000 depending on experience.
• Equity: Up to 0.2%.

Why join now