--- title: 'Research - Member of Technical Staff at Simile' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-jcv0fmwdbagc' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-15' --- # Research - Member of Technical Staff at Simile - **Company:** Simile - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-03-18 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/simile/fbf3ed84-26a2-489f-b62f-82f435568387 ## Job description ## About the Company Simile is The Simulation Company. We simulate human behavior to keep people at the center of the decisions that shape the world. With AI, anyone can create a product, a campaign, a policy, or a script — the bottleneck has moved upstream. The hard question is no longer whether you can create something, but what to create, for whom, and how to bring it to life. Those are fundamentally human decisions, and they shouldn't be left to chance or handed off to an algorithm. We're building the infrastructure to understand human behavior at scale and to represent humans in an increasingly agentic world. Our mission is to simulate all eight billion people on earth. We launched five months ago. Since then we've grown revenue 5x, built a new foundation model for human behavior that has run tens of millions of simulations for F100 enterprises, trained a first-of-its-kind confidence model that predicts the accuracy of every simulation, and released the first product that lets organizations verifiably predict the future. The world's leading companies use Simile to make business-critical decisions — from consumer leaders like CVS Health and Wealthfront to professional services organizations like Deloitte and Gallup — strategizing product launches, entering new markets, and forecasting earnings calls. We've raised over $200M at a $2B post-money valuation led by Greenoaks, with Index Ventures, Hanabi, A*, Bain Capital Ventures, and CVS Health Ventures. We've grown from a small home in Palo Alto to a global team of 50+, and we're building a team of the best researchers, engineers, designers, and operators in the world. The future is too important to be left to chance. ## About the Role As a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) in Research, you will work across the stack to train, evaluate, deploy, and monitor our models of human behavior. At Simile, we maintain a tight research-to-product pipeline. This requires intense scientific rigor; we must be able to trust our experimental methods as they are integrated into production systems that our customers use for making real high-stakes decisions. We are looking for researchers who find it gratifying to see their work pushed to its absolute limits. You will own the research cycle end-to-end: from designing the initial experiments and validating results to owning the "last-mile" work of deployment. In this role, you will: - Extract Insight from Unique Data: Work with massive, proprietary datasets that represent the breadth of human experience, including long-form unstructured interviews, large-scale polls, and passively collected behavioral data. - Master the Hardware: Write code for the latest NVIDIA chips. You will be responsible for running high-stakes experiments on GPUs and staying at the forefront of modern language model training and fine-tuning methodologies. - Lead Scientific Discovery: Design rigorous evaluations and conduct experiments that go beyond standard benchmarks to prove the fidelity of our behavioral simulations. - Push the State-of-the-Art: Stay immersed in the latest developments in simulation research. You will frequently reproduce, critique, and improve upon existing academic papers, maintaining a high standard for academic-quality writing and documentation. - Own the Lifecycle: Bridge the gap between a research hypothesis and a production-ready model, ensuring that our "flight simulators" for society are grounded in statistical truth. ## Requirements Must Haves - ML Proficiency: High proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with modern ML frameworks and AI coding tools. - Experimental Rigor: Experience running experiments on GPUs and a deep understanding of the training/fine-tuning lifecycle for large-scale models. - Research Literacy: Ability to navigate the frontier of ML research, with the technical skill to reproduce complex papers and the writing skill to document new breakthroughs. - End-to-End Ownership: A desire to own the full stack of research, from the first line of data processing code to the final deployment in a production environment. Nice to Haves - Academic & Technical Foundation: An academic background in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, Deep Learning, Computational Social Science, or a related field. - Interdisciplinary Expertise: Experience in social science modeling or behavioral economics. - Large-Scale Systems: Familiarity with distributed training and optimizing inference for multi-agent environments. ## Compensation & Benefits At Simile, we provide competitive compensation packages that include base salary, equity, and comprehensive benefits. - Salary Range: $200,000 – $400,000 USD - Note: Final offers are based on experience, specialized skills, interview performance, and relevant training. - Equity: Grants are available for eligible roles, subject to board approval. - Health & Wellness: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage. - Time Off: Flexible time off policies to support work-life balance. Our Process We prioritize thoughtful conversations and clear examples of past work. Our hiring journey is designed to help both sides align on fit, working style, and expectations. Reapplication Policy: To ensure a fair and thorough evaluation for all applicants, Simile observes a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion Equal Opportunity: Simile is an equal opportunity workplace. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities, valuing an environment where everyone can contribute authentically. Accommodations: If you require support or reasonable accommodations during the application process due to a disability, please let us know. We are happy to assist. ## About Simile ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Simile builds AI-powered simulations of human behavior, creating digital twins of real people to help enterprises predict outcomes and de-risk decisions. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series A) - **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, California, United States - **Founded**: 2025 (spun out of Stanford research) - **Founders**: Joon Sung Park (CEO), Michael Bernstein, Percy Liang ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Enterprise AI Simulation, Decision Intelligence, Market Research Technology - **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (Fortune 500 companies, including CVS Health, Gallup, Telstra, Wealthfront, Suntory) - **Mission or purpose statement**: "Simulate our uncertain world" — to give organizations the ability to preview the effects of decisions before triggering the cause. ## Products & Services - **Simile Simulation Platform**: An AI-powered platform that creates high-fidelity digital twins of real people, enabling enterprises to simulate human behavior at scale. Used for product testing, focus groups, earnings call rehearsal, litigation forecasting, and policy change modeling. The platform can predict ~80% of analyst questions on earnings calls and allows companies to test user interface changes, marketing campaigns, and policy shifts before real-world rollout. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total Funding — $100M (Series A, February 2026) - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Index Ventures (lead), Hanabi, A*, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), Fei-Fei Li, Andrej Karpathy, Adam D’Angelo (Quora), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Scott Belsky (A24). Customers include CVS Health, Gallup, Telstra, Wealthfront, and Suntory. - **Growth Signals**: Named to the inaugural Forbes AI 50 Brink List (April 2026); 26 employees with +12.5% monthly headcount growth; website traffic of ~815K monthly visits growing +41.2% month-over-month; LinkedIn following of 5,696 growing +8.7% monthly. ## Competitive Advantages - **Pioneering Research Roots**: Founded by the Stanford team behind the landmark "Smallville" experiment (2023), which demonstrated that generative AI agents could simulate realistic human social behavior — giving Simile a deep research moat. - **High-Fidelity Digital Twins**: Unlike generic LLM-based personas, Simile builds models based on real human data (interviews, transaction logs, scientific texts), creating agents that closely mirror actual human decision-making. - **First-Mover in Enterprise Simulation**: Already deployed with Fortune 50 clients (CVS, Gallup, Telstra) for high-stakes use cases like earnings call rehearsal, litigation forecasting, and product testing — a nascent but rapidly growing category. - **World-Class Backing**: $100M from top-tier investors (Index, BCV, A*) and angel investors including AI luminaries Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, providing both capital and credibility. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling the Simulation Model**: Expanding from hundreds of thousands of real human data points toward a goal of simulating the world's entire population (~8 billion people). - **Foundation Model Development**: Building a general-purpose foundation model that predicts human behavior in any situation, at any scale. - **Enterprise Adoption**: Deepening partnerships with Fortune 500 companies across industries (healthcare, telecom, financial services, consumer goods) to embed simulation into core decision-making processes. - **Product Expansion**: Moving beyond current use cases (focus groups, earnings calls, litigation forecasting) into broader enterprise planning and policy simulation. ## Why Work Here - **Cutting-Edge AI Research**: Work at the intersection of generative AI, human behavior modeling, and large-scale simulation — a field pioneered by the founding team at Stanford. - **High-Impact, Early-Stage**: Join a well-funded ($100M) Series A startup with only 26 employees, offering significant ownership and influence from day one. - **World-Class Team & Advisors**: Backed by AI legends Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy, with a founding team of Stanford CS professors. Colleagues come from top AI companies (Scale AI, Figma, Cresta, Hebbia). - **Real-World Impact**: Your work directly helps Fortune 500 companies make better decisions — from improving healthcare at CVS to shaping public opinion research at Gallup. - **Culture & Location**: Palo Alto-based (hybrid likely given the team is 72% US-based). Technical team makes up 28% of headcount. Fast-growing with +12.5% monthly employee growth. - **Notable Perks**: Work on one of the most technically ambitious problems in AI (simulating human behavior at global scale) with a team of world-class researchers and engineers. ## Sources 1. [simile.ai](https://simile.ai) 2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/simile](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/simile) 3. [LinkedIn - Simile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/simile-ai-inc) 4. [Observer - Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy’s New A.I. Bet](https://observer.com/2026/02/simile-100m-startup-backed-fei-fei-li-andrej-karpathy/) 5. [SiliconANGLE - AI digital twin startup Simile raises $100M](https://siliconangle.com/2026/02/12/ai-digital-twin-startup-simile-raises-100m-funding/) ## Other roles at Simile - [Deployment Strategist - Healthcare](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-strategist-healthcare-simile-new-york-decbrp0d51aw) — New York, NY - [Talent Partner, GTM](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-partner-gtm-simile-new-york-3330qppp0d0r) — New York, NY - [Infrastructure Engineer - Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-pf23pesce6fc) — San Francisco, CA - [ML Systems - Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/ml-systems-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-aabgzy98579g) — San Francisco, CA - [Member of Data Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-data-staff-simile-new-york-04e1tjg4n4ps) — New York, NY - [Security Engineer - Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-2hh02krn2xy0) — San Francisco, CA - [Evaluations - Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/evaluations-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-6d6h2mv7zeh2) — San Francisco, CA - [Deployment Strategist](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-strategist-simile-new-york-1qztj4y0p0jg) — New York, NY - [Product Engineer - Member of Technical Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/product-engineer-member-of-technical-staff-simile-san-francisco-csd64k7pq20m) — San Francisco, CA